Chokepoints

What are points in Pokemon games where you would often get stuck, either just as a kid or even now? Since I tended to avoid fights where possible and never grind when I was younger, I got stuck on a trainer at the end of Route 215 who had a Gyarados (this was Pokemon Pearl).

I haven't gotten stuck in a Pokemon game since Red, and I had soooo many chokepoints in that it was ridiculous, haha. I chose Charmander, so Brock slaughtered me, Misty made me cry, Lt. Surge was annoying until I got a Dugtrio - which was hard because it kept killing everything and wouldn't stay caught - and I had to grind a lot for Blaine. Lance was really hard for me back then too until I went back and caught Articuno. Not knowing what you're doing sucks when you're 10 years old. xD

As a child I got stuck hard core with Pokemon Ruby, I needed a friends help with a guide book to get out of Lilycove City. For a year I just grinded my Pokemon against the Glooms and Linoone in the wild next to it. My Blaziken was in its 80s :v

As a small child I forgot how to save my game in Pokemon yellow, and I got 'stuck' outside of the Rock Tunnel. I grinded up around Rock Tunnel's Pokemon center inadvertently by changing my Pokemon boxes after I caught voltorbs.

In gen 4 I get stuck around heart home city, but I quickly looked it up in a guide book. Recently I got stuck after beating Whitney, I didn't realize you needed to talk to her again after she cried.

... I have bad reading comprehension lol

i literally restarted my first ever save file/run of Pokemon Emerald when i got to Slateport City because i didn't know what to do to get the grunts blocking the museum out of the way. i thought i got soft locked and restarted before doing any sort of research. felt like such an idiot when i found out i just had to talk to some dude in that boat building warehouse thing or whatever it was called.

Roni said:

i literally restarted my first ever save file/run of Pokemon Emerald when i got to Slateport City because i didn't know what to do to get the grunts blocking the museum out of the way. i thought i got soft locked and restarted before doing any sort of research. felt like such an idiot when i found out i just had to talk to some dude in that boat building warehouse thing or whatever it was called.

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I used to reset my games A LOT.
I never owned a GBA so I only got to play the old ones recently on emulators, but when I was younger I had Pearl, Black 2, White 2, Alpha Sapphire, and Moon.
I recall resetting every one of those, normally because I felt like I had to start over when ever I came back to the game after a long time. I did it for a legitimate reason in Moon though, I got walled by Acerola since my starter was Decidueye. The only reason I didn't reset more than once in that game was because a friend traded me a Katarna and I didn't want to erase it from existence XD

I don't remember ever getting stuck in a main story of a pokemon game. I'd often get bored of the story as a kid and just go battle trainers and wild pokemon until I could be bothered going to go read what the NPCs had to say.

I think the only time I ever got stuck in a pokemon game full stop though was in Fr/Lg when I tried to grind my pokemon up by re-challenging the pokemon league. I used to level up my pokemon in Emerald by giving it an Exp. Share and slaughtering the elite 4, but in Fr/Lg the elite 4 had different, stronger pokemon which obliterated me. I lost my cartridge at some point so I don't think I ever got round to winning that rematch.

As a child I got stuck on Drake in every playthrough of Emerald.

I always had to let myself faint out of the elite four and go catch Rayquaza. Then I would go back and massacre his whole team.

Once upon a time, I used to play pokemon emerald with just my starter. i mean, the whole game. I would just use my trusty ol' mudkip/marshtop/swampert the whole game. I would catch other pokemon but only for hms and such. We all remember the hellish may battle right before mauville, right? if you also picked mudkip then she has this annoying as hell grovyle that has absorb (which regenerates the damage I give to 'em). because I was stuck with my marshtomp, I had no choice but to grind to lvl 30 before I got past her.

course, i learned some epic team-building skills as I grew up :P but the memories whenever I replay Gen 3/6 Hoenn and I get to battle May in Route 110, both nostalgic and annoying really.

During my first Red playthrough I had a hard time getting through the Rocket hideout in Saffron City. I mean, I know how to get through it today, but back then...little ol' impatient me didn't want to go through 5000 Rocket battles with no potions on hand.

Percy said:

Once upon a time, I used to play pokemon emerald with just my starter. i mean, the whole game. I would just use my trusty ol' mudkip/marshtop/swampert the whole game. I would catch other pokemon but only for hms and such. We all remember the hellish may battle right before mauville, right? if you also picked mudkip then she has this annoying as hell grovyle that has absorb (which regenerates the damage I give to 'em). because I was stuck with my marshtomp, I had no choice but to grind to lvl 30 before I got past her.

course, i learned some epic team-building skills as I grew up :P but the memories whenever I replay Gen 3/6 Hoenn and I get to battle May in Route 110, both nostalgic and annoying really.

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110 May is horrible 😔

may/brendan route 110 is a big one LOL. that fight is so rough for some reason, ig because you don't have all that many resources by that point. it also really depends on your team but that fight kicks my ass sometimes even to this day.

cheren in BW2 is one too. he's probably the most difficult first gym leader and i have had the rare experience of getting through him in one attempt but like damn. and yes i KNOW riolu is at floccessy ranch that don't mean i feel like using it okay

As a child, I got stuck getting HM Surf from the Safari Zone in Red/Blue. I couldn't get to Cinnabar so I leveled up my team to 80. I almost stopped playing Pokémon entirely at age 7. The house next door had some older kids and they borrowed my game for 10 minutes and got me Surf lol. The rest is history... I never got stuck with another game.

Two points come to mind where I got stuck on. I have to note that I usually play the games in such a way that my team ends up being underleveled, sometimes quite severely. As a result some trainer end up being a huge road block.

1. Ghetsis in White: his team ended up being too powerful for my party to handle so after many attempts I managed to win by X-Item spamming onto my Excadrill.

2. Siebold in X: not only was my team very underleveld, his Gyarados also knows Dragon Dance. So it kept getting stronger and stronger and then started sweeping. To make matters worse: his Starmie knows Light Screen and with most of my party being Special Attackers it was even harder to deal damage. This was one of the instances where I ended up grinding a little bit. It's also one of the reasons why I usually disagree with people who say that XY are easy games.

Tbf, I never made it to the e4 (before I returned to pokemon after leaving for a year, but I've only done emulated GB, GBC, and GBA games, never the ones I actually own for... reasons XD). Except in Black 2... oh, and Alpha Sapphire, but I still never beat Unova E4/Steven respectively. And I goddamn reset my save file for no reason and I'll never have the patience to get to Steven again 😔
Though on the bright side, I think I've beaten every Gen 1, 2, and 3 game except Sapphire and Emerald, and most of them in nuzlockes.

My biggest issue was the ice path in gsc - it was so difficult for me to figure out how to get through it that I lent my game to a classmate to help me. Was so happy when he returned it the next day and my character was right outside the exit. ❤️

Figuring out where to dive to get to the final aqua/magma hideout in rse was also tough at first, since the water was so vast.

The Snowpoint Gym was just the worst, and I can't wait for Bd/Sp to teach a whole new generation the meaning of icy frustration.

I also had trouble on the Plasma Frigate in Bw2, in the section with the password - like, yes, it was easy to figure out that the password was Zekrom, but I had no idea where or how I was supposed to enter it!!

The most recent one was finding the Spectrier cemetery in the Crown Tundra. Maybe I just have worse sense of direction than Leon, but that random little spot (and the even smaller spot where you can actually get in, as opposed to the maze of walls that don't take you anywhere surrounding it) was hard to find again in the vastness of the wild area - especially when your Switch is starting to have drift issues...😱

I got lost in Floaroma Town / the Windworks for a month because I didn't realise that if you went to the back of the flower fields Floaroma Meadow was there...

And then in Explorers of Darkness, I really sucked as a child so I kept dying in all of the boss fights and I remember only being able to beat Primal Dialga at Level 50 or so. What got me stuck forever though was the Aegis Cave puzzle, so I left and just did a ton of missions. But I remained terrible, so at one point I disabled the IQ skill preventing your allies from doing long-range attacks through you, and then promptly got annihilated by my partner Pikachu (who was around Level 70) using Shock Wave on a Level 97 me (Cyndaquil). I think that will be one of the low points of my life hopefully for a long time

As like most people, Rock tunnel spelled doom with a capital D for me.

My child brain could not figure out that first large ice slide puzzle in ice path from GSC. One day it just clicked and I finally made it to Blackthorn, but I remember it taking a seriously long time.

feels weird that, like Dawn, i've never really gotten stuck in a pokemon game (at least, i don't recall being stuck, anyway). i'm pretty sure there have been a few points here and there, but i've managed to figure out how to progress without much difficulty and it usually involves speaking to a npc i've overlooked or something.