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How hard can you make a vanilla Pokemon game? Trashlockes are usually the answer to that question, keeping vanilla enemies unchanged while forcing the player to use low-tier encounters.
But what if you want to raise difficulty without changing trainers OR wild Pokemon availability? Gauntlet Gold is an experiment with that idea. It is vanilla Pokemon Gold, but with difficulty upped by forcing long trainer gauntlets with limited access to healing items.
Every route, cave and gym will trap you in until you have cleared every trainer. You can no longer buy potions from marts; what you find on the ground is all you get for healing within gauntlets. Even Indigo Plateau will not sell healing items, so you will want to manage your resources carefully to be able to beat the Elite Four.
Basically, this game is inspired by the resource-management strategies of the ironmon challenge, as well as the gauntlet system used in Garbage Green. Although Gauntlet Gold is easier by design, as it doesn't also impose a trashlocke. It makes for a fun and fast-paced challenge run.
This game has been designed with level caps in mind. Rare candies are available in every Mart to eliminate grinding, but you will want to be careful to manage your EXP and avoid over-leveling gym leaders.
Level caps
Falkner - 9
Bugsy - 16
Whitney - 20
Morty - 25
Chuck - 30
Pryce - 31
Jasmine - 35
Clair - 40
Elite Four - enter at 47
Kanto gym leaders - 58 (easiest to use Blue's level cap for all of them)
Red - 77
Changes to note
- Gym leaders and other bosses now have a line of vision. They will see you and battle you like other trainers do.
- Trade evolutions and friendship evolutions are now level-up evos, except for Togetic at level 20 and Blissey at level 58. Umbreon and Espeon evolve via Moon Stone and Sun Stone respectively. Slowking evolves via Water Stone.
- Overworld poison damage has been removed.
- Escape methods (Escape Rope, Dig, Teleport, etc.) have been disabled.
- You can't fly out of certain routes. You cannot fly out of Blackthorn City, but you CAN fly out of Blackthorn PokeCenter (it will make sense when you get there).
- Olivine's new gym features automatic sandstorm conditions.
- Your mother now buys you status-healing berries when she saves your money, to account for the removal of berry trees. Don't worry, she'll still buy dolls for your room!
- Any farmable source of healing items is removed, and usually replaced with Slowpoketails. Wild Pokemon can no longer hold berries.
- The field effects of Milk Drink and Softboiled have been removed.
- TMs usually available in Goldenrod Department Store are no longer there. Headbutt and Rock Smash TMs are now purchasable at the Indigo Plateau mart. The elemental punch TMs are only purchasable in Celadon City in Kanto. The gifted Return and Frustration TMs are replaced with Roar.
- Coin Case only becomes accessible during the Rocket takeover of Goldenrod.
- Stat EXP (the gen 2 equivalent of EVs) is removed completely.
- For quality of life, you can now adjust time and day in-game. Simply press up or down on the PokeGear screen.
A word of warning for when Team Rocket take over Radio Tower
Spoiler:
Info on the Kanto postgame (major spoilers)
Spoiler:
Why Pokemon Gold?
Most gen 2 hacks use Crystal as a base, and with good reason. But this means that the sprites from Gold and Silver rarely get seen, so I wanted to give them some love.
Also, Gold and Silver place some extra limitations on the player to add some difficulty to the game. For example, you cannot access most evolution stones until you reach Kanto.
Gold over Silver because I like Gligar. And alliteration.
Patch
Gauntlet Gold - Google Drive
Patch to a clean Gold rom.
Documents and resources
I recommend this hack be played without reference to documentation, as there are some surprises and part of the fun is adapting to them.
But if you want docs, here they are:
A handy spreadsheet with trainer docs and links to other resources, created by KiriMMC: Gauntlet Gold Full Docs - Google Sheets
List of trainers in every gauntlet, in simple list format, in case you prefer it to the spreadsheet: Gauntlet Gold trainer doc - Google Docs
The amazing damage calc created by KinglerChamp, which you can use to calc against every trainer in Pokemon Gold: https://kinglerchamp.github.io/VanillaNuzlockeCalc/?gen=2
Credits
This game was made entirely using pret's pokegold disassembly + PolishedMap.
Thank you to playtesters, and in particular thanks to Aggr0nn and Hawlucha47 for their feedback.
Cover art made by Damnittom_
Attachments
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