Hi! I'm new here, made an account because I got interested in romhacks, but I also did a neat challenge run in Scarlet recently which as far as I've been able to tell, I don't think this specific idea has shown up anywhere else so I'm leaving it here for people to play with/do what they want:
Pokemon Airplane Mode
The idea was based on the fact that a reasonable way to get from real life Spain to real life Japan, the places the main game and DLC part 1 are based on, would be to fly on a plane (when I came up with this idea I had not played the DLC and didn't know that you actually literally fly on a plane to get from Paldea to Kitakami and Blueberry Academy), and theoretically, you could restrict yourself to only a carry-on for said flight. Looking into it,
japanese airlines have a limit of 10kg or about 22lbs for a carry-on, so the challenge is that your entire party, including boxed pokemon, must weigh in total no more than 22lbs. When you catch or evolve a pokemon that brings you above this limit, you have to release one of your pokemon, although it doesn't have to be the one that you just caught or evolved.
This is an incredibly restrictive limit for Pokemon, but I have verified that it is possible to make it through the entire main story of the main game and get to Kitakami with a team weighing under 22lbs, and I documented that journey on a discord server with some friends. I can share some screenshots from that in limited form here if that's of interest to folks but obviously I talk a lot about the weight of the pokemon I catch so like, massive spoilers for people interested in doing one of these runs. I didn't play with permadeath or anything because releasing Pokemon that put me over the limit was already a rough enough time emotionally, and needing to primarily use weak/unevolved Pokemon meant that even without permadeath there was a substantial challenge. You could try this with permadeath though.
I looked up the weight of a few pokemon before starting just to make sure I could get ANY pokemon under 22lbs, but after that I was playing blind as the spirit of the challenge for me was that each catch or evolution was a tough decision and an extremely tense moment, wondering if this would be goodbye or a massive powerup to my buddy. Similarly, I wasn't catching repeat pokemon since once you catch one, you can look up its weight in the pokedex and make an informed decision about whether it would overload your team or not.
I stopped doing my run once I made it to Kitakami out of kindness to a few of my pokemon that had been struggling really hard past about level 50 and because I wanted to experience the DLC story for the first time without worrying about the challenge, but if I were to do this again I would definitely want to keep going through the entire DLC, especially given that in the Blueberry Academy story there's a part that kinda forces you to shake up your team a little so you can't really keep one team the entire way through. And in the fiction of the run, anytime you're traveling from one region to another you're taking a plane so the carry-on rule still applies.
Some potential variations or ideas to add to this:
- As mentioned, permadeath
- Try with other games! I'd be fascinated to see how it goes with something like the gen 4 games, or romhacks even!
- A friend suggested having a region-specific reserve, as in pokemon that exceed the weight limit but can only be used in the region where you caught them, so I could use a haxorus or something but only in paldea since that's where I caught it
- If you REALLY want to stick with the idea of a carry-on weight limit, clear your bag of all items before each time you travel between regions and start fresh in the new region
- Try keeping your starter on your team for as long as possible
I've put a lot of thought into this, but it truly is a space for people to play in and share ideas about, which is why I've posted it as a discussion rather than a challenge. If someone else wanted to start it up as a challenge, I would have no problem with that, and if folks just want to throw out ideas to make it more interesting, I'd love to hear them!
