I take what I said in the previous update back. Let's see how "well" this challenge went...
I unsuccessfully tried bruteforcing through Silver's Gastly with Struggle, but found myself short on HP because of Curse, once I reached Quilava. So, 2 attempts later, I decided to grind a little bit to one-shot Gastly with Struggle, so it can't set up Curse. My overleveled Wynaut still had somewhat harder time with Quilava, because it started spamming Smoke Screen.
For Bugsy, I encountered another problem. His Scyther could either one-shot me or use U-Turn to hide from recoil damage from Counter. So I had to also use my Struggle strategy with high levels.
Getting to Goldenrod, I could upgrade my strategy with new items. I'm talking about X items, because they could rise my defenses so I won't get killed by super-effective moves. And as you'll see, this was right call. For Whitney, the battle was pretty straightforward. Got pretty lucky with her moves and beat her easily in every run.
Morty on the other hand... Oh Morty... There are several problems with Morty. First - half of his team is immune to my moves. I can't hit them any other way besides Struggle. But here comes the second problem - If I Struggle, the combination of Struggle recoil damage and Curse will kill me, while facing Gengar. It took me several days and even more attempts to try different strategies, but in the end, I focused on solving one fatal question - Can I start the battle with Struggle and then return to my moveset? Turns out I can. I can use Leppa Berries. They can ge aquired fairly easily, but they take 16 hours to grow up. Good thing about Leppa Berries is that if they are held by Wynaut, they can automatically restore one move from 0 to 10 PP. But there are even better items - Ether and Elixir. I can get both via Pickup ability. But they are rare, like 1% rare. So I caught 5 Sentret, got them to level 40 and grinded for items. In the meantime, I got loads of Full Restores and Full Heals that proved to be vital in healing Wynaut this early. And I could sell rest of the items to get more X items.
Back for Morty. I started the battle with 0 PP, set up 6 X Defenses and beat Gastly and both Haunter. But despite my preparations, Gengar was still hard enemy to overcome. On one attempt, I entered the fight with half HP and Gengar easily beat me, on another attempt, Gengar landed a critical hit, on another I managed to beat Gengar, but died to Struggle recoil damage... In the end, I had to carefully manage my HP from the start and enter the fight with Gengar with full HP. Surprisingly, his Hypnosis wasn't even a problem, thanks to my Full Restores and Full Heals.
Now, sections between Gyms and major battle were pretty boring. Nothing could really kill, but everything took way too long to die. So, let's skip to another Gym. Chuck! I thought this would be easy battle. Just come in and Counter my way to victory. But turns out Focus Punch is nice counter to Counter. Get it? Anyway... I had to quickly get my PP down to 0 and deal with his team using Struggle. It damaged me more than them, but in the end, I won.
Similar story with Jasmine, but I actually only used Struggle on her Magnemite, because Steelix only took small portion of damage from it. But it wasn't anything I couldn't deal with. One Ether later and Jasmine is a history.
Let's skip Team Rocket arc, because their pathetic Pokémon were no match for Wynaut. They were annoying with their poison, but had no chance against me. Pryce on the other hand was fun. His Seel and Dewgong has movesets centered around using moves while asleep and they have pretty even distribution of Physical and Special moves. So I started the battle with Struggle and only used Ether against Piloswine.
Clair is interesting Gym Leader. All of her Pokémon are all-out attackers. That means it should be easy to predict their moves. In reality, her Gyarados completely shred me to pieces on my first attempt of her with critical hit. I went in on higher level on my next attempt and got lucky to set up my X items. Few Mirror Coats later and her team was gone.
Elite Four was actually the moment, when the game got some good pacing. By pacing I mean I could use my moveset effectively in battles. Rival battle was good training, but nothing to write home about. Will's Pokémon had somewhat annoying movesets, but his Pokémon still prefer to attack me with damaging moves, so I got past him quickly. Koga hajd similar problem + his Pokémon could inflict annoyign statuses. I got into Counter battle against Bruno's Hitmontop, but otherwise his team was the easiest. Way too easy. But Karen... I got Morty flashbacks against her. Luckily, I could set up my X items easily against her Umbreon. I realized way too late her Gengar is almost invincible against my moves and then lost to his Destiny Board when I locked myself in Struggle. I prepared better on the next attempt and set up Struggle on Murkrow. Before I could take Gengar down, I had to stall until he wastes his Destiny Board PP on nothing. It took a while, but in the end, I beat Gengar and then quickly took down Houndoom too. Lance's team had offensive movesets, so it was easy to beat them. I did end up in red HP in the end (and multiple times during the battle), but I don't think it was that hard.
With that, I'm new Johto Champion. But I wanted more. Since this post is getting longer and I don't want to repeat myself much, all of Kanto's Gym Leaders fell down to my cheesy overpowered X items strategy. Some battles took a while, because I had to get rid of my PP in the middle of the battle, but since I got pretty comfortable with my strategy, there wasn't really any problems. I ended up in red HP in almost every battle, but still managed to win. Oh and I got Leftovers, while going through Kanto.
And so, I got to Red. My stategy was simple. I used damage calc to find out that Red's Pikachu will take about half of Wynaut's HP with its Volt Tackle. So I started by raising my Defense and healing in the meantime. I hoped Pikachu would KO itself, but it started using Thunderbolt instead after almost knocking itself out with Volt Tackle. So I raised my Sp Defense and then went into offensive. I beat Piakchu by bouncing its Thunderbolt back, beat Charizard with its own Flamethrower and then had long battle with Snorlax and Red's Water-types. For some reason all Pokémon that knew Blizzard used it almost exclusively. Which made things easier. His final Pokémon was Venusaur, who couldn't do anything to my Wynaut.
And with that, the run was finished. Here's the screen of final moments:
Let's talk a little bit about this challenge. I was skeptical about it at first and the early game was way too boring for me. Wynaut couldn't be killed and inflicted small damage. It changed around the 4th Gym, when I really had to tap into my Pokémon knowledge and had to come up with new strategy. But, I have a bad feeling about this run. It was hard. Probably the hardest run I've ever done. And it will be hard to top. Where do I move from here? I have to say that the start of this challenge was very frustrating. And I'm not playing games to feel frustrated. I want to have fun. And feel challenged. I want to feel like I'm getting something out of the run. I want to understand the mechanics of the game on deeper level, I want to explore the boundaries of what is possible to do. That's why I don't feel like doing this solo run with Pokémon like Caterpie, because its moves doesn't really offer anything like this. It would be easy to just ban 99% of mechanics for a run and called it a hard challenge. But I don't think it's hard. Challenge like this feels like it was designed by a someone, who doesn't understand. So, what is left for me here? I could do more of these, but as you can see, I'll most likely just use X items to counter any disadvantages of my chosen Pokémon. After a while, these runs would get stale. And because I can pretty much play any Pokémon game on autopilot, while doing something else, there isn't really a point in doing so for regular runs. That's why I love out events, especially the ones Loomie comes up with, but as organizer, I really don't find much time to play them myself. I also recently figured out that I hate noting every encounter in nuzlockes down just to write about them here. But that's problem for my Genlocke. Well, I went a little bit crazy over here with my thoughts, didn't I? I just feel like I peaked with this run and can't really outdo myself. Anyway... Let's look at the lady herself that beat the whole Johto and Kanto on her own.
Regret 7, Careful Female Wynaut
lvl 100, Shadow Tag
- Counter
- Mirror Coat
- Encore
- Safeguard
