The final part of the challenge was indeed pretty hard. Not a fan of the situations in which everything til the League goes extremely smooth, but then at the League, it gets pretty hard. However, it often happened with most challenges.
As you might know, I played on the DS itself, which made things slower, but that's ok. I decided to avoid resetting some battles and accept the loss. I had to do the League three times to finally beat it. The first time I lost against Flint. I accepted the loss and went to train again. I bought some more supplies and tried another time. This time, I managed to get past Flint. Lucian has always been pretty hard to beat and here's when I had to keep resetting, mainly because I needed some tries to elaborate the correct strategy. Once I got past it, it was time for Cynthia.
This is was the hard part. The level gap was real and my team, despite the kind of strategy, could not do it. In addition to it, I had another thing that made things a bit harder: since I am gonna keep this save file and keep playing on it and probably make pokemon for the Battle Frontier, I decided to avoid spending too much money and especially to avoid teaching my pokemon most TMs. This, of course made things a little harder, with some pokemon like Steelix having a not particularly good moveset: strength, rock climb, curse and sandstorm.
Overall, the problem was that almost every move KOed all of my pokemon. So, I decided to purposely loose the battle against Cynthia and keep training. Right when I was about to do that last fight against Cynthia in which I was supposed to loose, something happened. Basically, Cynthia uses 3 full heals. In some trials, my plan was to get her to spend them all of Spiritomb, who could be easily defeated by Empoleon. But, Cynthia after using a full heal once, preferred to let Spritomb die. What happened in this particular match was that I kept pressing the same move with Empoleon because I simply wanted to be defeated to start over. Eventually, Spiritomb was healed and once it was about to die again, here's that Cynthia does an interesting move: she changes it for Lucario. This happened several hours ago, therefore, I can't remember the exact moves I did, but I got myself the damage calculator and thought about each move very carefully. Eventually, I managed to get extremely close to the victory. So close that, technically, mathematically I won. But things went differently. My last pokemon was Togekiss and Cynthia's was Roserade. I successfully managed to put Roserade to sleep, while Roserade poisoned my Togekiss. There was the hail set up by Abomasnow too. I didn't input all the data on the damage calculator and therefore, I didn't get an actually precise output and that made me do a wrong move, which was not healing Togekiss, knowing that she would have resisted both poison and hail. But that wasn't the case. Because of those, my Togekiss fainted and I lost the battle. This is the last thing I saw:
And that was heartbreaking, despite the fact that if I look at the "challenging side" of the game, I managed to plan all of the moves correctly. So, while it's not an actual victory, I am proud of what I managed to accomplish in that game and to me, that's basically a win, because such a mistake it's not a strategy mistake, but rather a bad calculation made on a not perfect result that I read on the calculator.
Anyway, I tried a couple of more times, but Cynthia didn't do the same move these other times and I just preferred loosing and starting over again. I did some changes that made my team stronger:
- Togekiss forgot Fly and instead learned air slash
- I got Mystic Water and gave it to Empoleon. Side note: I wanted to do that since my first try at the League, but not only I forgot the first time. I forgot even the second time lol
- trained my team
I bought some more supplies just in case and the League was extremely easy up til Flint. The first trial was instead a lot harder even in the earlier stages. I remember that to win against the ground E4, I had to plan my moves very carefully. Lucian was harder as usual and I had to figure out the right strategy for the different pokemon. It required me more thinking, but overall, I managed pretty well. Finally Cynthia. She's strong, no doubt. I had to use some supplies and to carefully think about turns and stuff. I used the calculator too while being more specific and it still wasn't exactly perfect, but it was indeed a good indication. I finally managed to beat her and therefore I completed this old challenge I had started lol.
Overall, it was fun and had nice rules. I feel like the worst part was the League for another reason: the team was mainly steel type. which doesn't help when almost each pokemon of the 4th E4 and of the champion has very powerful fighting type coverage moves. Another thing I want to add is that while Steelix had a role at some point during my 2nd League trial, it just came to the field to die for repositioning in the 3rd trial. I wasn't fun of that, but she was definitely less useful than other members of the team.
Finally, my idea is to platinate this save file of Pokemon Platinum, meaning that I want to complete pokemon platinum: battle frontier, contests, pokedex, ecc. I will make a newer thread on that and this run is the main story save file.
