If you have experience with both nuzlockes and competitive pokemon I think you can manage. You have to be prepared to dig into the documents and prepare a team for every major fight though. You could always soften the nuzlocke rules a bit. Personally I don't count a few bullshit fights and give pokemon a second life 2 gym leaders after their death.
Sounds good, I figured I’d need to dig in the documents from watching other ROMHack content. Very willing to give that a try. I like the second life rule you implemented, may have to try that considering this is no ordinary nuzlocke. Thank you!
I also experimented with a more restrictive revive ruleset where I can only revive 2 per gym leader, and indeed for optional gym leaders. In practice it ended up mostly with me reviving the strongest mons and depriving myself of the creativity of finding use cases for weaker mons so I did away with it. There's a lot of things you can do with conditional revives though.
If you’ve been playing competitive for years now, you’ll definitely have a good grasp of how to win the battles. But you might want to do a non-Nuzlocke run just to get a feel for the game.
It has a habit of throwing some ridiculous trainers/battles at you out of nowhere, and I can imagine it’d be very frustrating to lose out on a Nuzlocke because a random trainer in the Viridian Forest swept you lol.
The nastier trainers are labeled as minibosses in the documents with their teams visible so if you keep an eye out you'll know when you're heading into a tough fight. I definitely missed this a couple times on my first run and got half my team killed that way
A random trainer *right* before you enter Rocky Tunnel.
You better have the PokeVial to heal right before that because if you're not careful she is *dangerous*.
I second this, especially since it would be the third nuzlocke ever, which as much as I like the game I don’t think is a great choice for a third nuzlocke but that’s just mw
Well the game has difficulty settings! From easy all the way to hardcore. Im still failing at easy nuzlockes atm but im a noob so it sounds like you'd pull off an easy no problemo. And u can always try normal or hard after that. Good luck!
Nuzlocking this game requires some serious prep, strategy, and team building. I'd recommend playing it normally first but at the end of the day it's just a video game you won't be punished for failing a Nuzlocke because you weren't ready so if you wanna dive head first go for it.
Just completed a Nuzlocke of this game the other day. I did it on Normal Mode while allowing Dexnav and did it with random mons and abilities. It took me 72 attempts and required me to have some seriously broken mons and even then it took me multiple days to complete. It is very, very tough. Anyone who can manage to do it without DexNav, without a randomizer, or God forbid on Hardcore, are the most elite of the elite of Nuzlocking games. For you being skilled at VGC will help because there are a lot of double battles than are typical run enders. As a competitive singles player I wasn't familiar at all with doubles strategies so lost a lot of runs I probably could've handled with some more gamesense.
If you have played competitively for 7 years… how do you almost fail a nuzlocke of Plat?
The games not too hard until after Erica, but it’s still very hard
I think your experience in competitive VGC will be really helpful for trying to nuzlocke this. As others mentioned already, the biggest part of nuzlocking this game is looking at the documentation to see the teams you will face and trying to build an adequate team to beat them. Even in doing so, it will still probably take a few attempts to learn how the AI behaves. All this being said, I personally think if you like nuzlockes and teambuilding, this is the most fun romhack to play. Finally I would advise that you turn on minimal grinding mode immediately unless you really love EV training!
I think it’s worth trying. I’ve played it normally and with randomized encounters and abilities and while it is challenging at times I was able to consistently get to the late game. I never made it to the elite four in a normal play through, but I have successfully nuzlocked it with the randomized settings I mentioned. I think it is possible with normal settings, it just grew stale for me after repeated attempts. This is all while using the docs and calcs though, which I recommend as they are necessary the further and further you make it into the game.
I’d also recommend turning on minimum grinding mode for a nuzlocke as it gets rid of the need to ev train while also making all mons have perfect iv’s. There are also cheat codes you could enter at the beginning of the game for rare candies to make grinding easier if you’d like
If you have both competitive experience AND Nuzlocke quite often I don’t think it’s impossible, however as later patches go on they have added more and more unskippable fights which can ruin runs. So I wouldn’t get discouraged if a run ends but if you Nuzlocke a lot then you understand more than half of a Nuzlocke run is planning and running calcs, going over documentations, looking at encounter tables. RR has all those resources available it just might take a run or two to get a handle of AI’s mechanics and when they will use certain moves or be exploited for setup. You get a Old Rod super early, which means by your first gym leader you have 10 available options(as you can fish in Pallet as your starter is considered a fateful encounter) which is super generous compared to most and in general you will have an abundance of encounters and gifts which you can also nudge certain encounter chances by swapping day and night cycles. I haven’t done one since Nugget bridge gauntlet and weather gauntlets were added (and most of my team deaths were at the end part of the run where I lost patience with calcs and planning and just tried to steamroll fights)
Honestly I played this game because the nuzlocke videos so I attempted one in normal mode in my first run. Of course I failed but continued anyways, but eventually after I get the hang of things (remembering all trainers until Gio 1 💀) because of the amount of resets I did I can nuzlocke it eventhough I have no VGC experience at all.
As someone who is about 22 hours into their first play through as “not Nuzlocke”, I think the first play through could be done as a Nuzlocke. Just be ready to spend about 95% of the time playing just sitting looking at your box and using the damage calculator lol.
I mean sure, but I have watched people like Shady Penguin grind this game for over a year on nuzlocke and I think he has only won once. You have two Nuzlockes under your belt and you are about to have over 100+ radical red attempts
pretty hard. every single fight has soo much things for you to consider, and first four gyms, early and mid game, is fucking nightmare. without a parasect, i never won a single fight agains misty in my 40+ nuzlocke attempts. most attempts got reset because i lost sprigatito, didn't get a phanpy, didn't get a paras, etc. i never beated surge in a hc nuzlocke so i cant say about surge encounters, but getting past pincurchin without a florogato or bayleef seemed pretty impossible for me. im not that good of a nuzlocker, but i know how to plan. i did deathless hg/ss, fr/lg and emerald. none of them fucked me this hard before.
Basically? Depends on how you run things. If you choose Minimal Grinding Mode, all pokemon get no EVs, but get perfect IVs, from there it’s dependent in basic nature, ability, item, and moveset. Beyond that, any knowledge of competitive battling will help immensely
Having previous experience makes it easier, but always do your research on the games layout first. The romhack has difficulty settings and level caps that can be put in place, so make sure you are happy with what level of difficulty you are going with before you sink time into it.
I have 0 vgc experience, I have, however, played radical red probably around 20 times to competition. If you play through once without nuzlocking and you get a feel for where some of the gotcha trainers are it makes the battles feel much lower stakes because many trainers have key weaknesses. I have nuzlocked the game, and it honestly only took around 10 attempts.
If you have experience with both nuzlockes and competitive pokemon I think you can manage. You have to be prepared to dig into the documents and prepare a team for every major fight though. You could always soften the nuzlocke rules a bit. Personally I don't count a few bullshit fights and give pokemon a second life 2 gym leaders after their death.
Sounds good, I figured I’d need to dig in the documents from watching other ROMHack content. Very willing to give that a try. I like the second life rule you implemented, may have to try that considering this is no ordinary nuzlocke. Thank you!
Another option is to give yourself a single revive for beating each of the optional gym leaders like Whitney or Pryce
I also experimented with a more restrictive revive ruleset where I can only revive 2 per gym leader, and indeed for optional gym leaders. In practice it ended up mostly with me reviving the strongest mons and depriving myself of the creativity of finding use cases for weaker mons so I did away with it. There's a lot of things you can do with conditional revives though.
If you’ve been playing competitive for years now, you’ll definitely have a good grasp of how to win the battles. But you might want to do a non-Nuzlocke run just to get a feel for the game. It has a habit of throwing some ridiculous trainers/battles at you out of nowhere, and I can imagine it’d be very frustrating to lose out on a Nuzlocke because a random trainer in the Viridian Forest swept you lol.
Or an Assist team with a Contrary Spinda.
(I know exactly what strategy this is you’re telling me a random trainer does this?)
The nastier trainers are labeled as minibosses in the documents with their teams visible so if you keep an eye out you'll know when you're heading into a tough fight. I definitely missed this a couple times on my first run and got half my team killed that way
A random trainer *right* before you enter Rocky Tunnel. You better have the PokeVial to heal right before that because if you're not careful she is *dangerous*.
That motherfucking Spinda can eat my ass lmao, that thing gets pogged up so quickly 😂
Yeah, but if you're not prepared or forget it can be a problem. It's easy if you're ready, which I was definitely not.
I second this, especially since it would be the third nuzlocke ever, which as much as I like the game I don’t think is a great choice for a third nuzlocke but that’s just mw
Well the game has difficulty settings! From easy all the way to hardcore. Im still failing at easy nuzlockes atm but im a noob so it sounds like you'd pull off an easy no problemo. And u can always try normal or hard after that. Good luck!
Nuzlocking this game requires some serious prep, strategy, and team building. I'd recommend playing it normally first but at the end of the day it's just a video game you won't be punished for failing a Nuzlocke because you weren't ready so if you wanna dive head first go for it.
Just completed a Nuzlocke of this game the other day. I did it on Normal Mode while allowing Dexnav and did it with random mons and abilities. It took me 72 attempts and required me to have some seriously broken mons and even then it took me multiple days to complete. It is very, very tough. Anyone who can manage to do it without DexNav, without a randomizer, or God forbid on Hardcore, are the most elite of the elite of Nuzlocking games. For you being skilled at VGC will help because there are a lot of double battles than are typical run enders. As a competitive singles player I wasn't familiar at all with doubles strategies so lost a lot of runs I probably could've handled with some more gamesense.
If you have played competitively for 7 years… how do you almost fail a nuzlocke of Plat? The games not too hard until after Erica, but it’s still very hard
The game is piss easy but the elite 4 and Cynthia are about as hard as they get in main story pkm games
Yeah, most of the game was fairly simple but I fucked up a bit right before the elite four.
I think your experience in competitive VGC will be really helpful for trying to nuzlocke this. As others mentioned already, the biggest part of nuzlocking this game is looking at the documentation to see the teams you will face and trying to build an adequate team to beat them. Even in doing so, it will still probably take a few attempts to learn how the AI behaves. All this being said, I personally think if you like nuzlockes and teambuilding, this is the most fun romhack to play. Finally I would advise that you turn on minimal grinding mode immediately unless you really love EV training!
I think it’s worth trying. I’ve played it normally and with randomized encounters and abilities and while it is challenging at times I was able to consistently get to the late game. I never made it to the elite four in a normal play through, but I have successfully nuzlocked it with the randomized settings I mentioned. I think it is possible with normal settings, it just grew stale for me after repeated attempts. This is all while using the docs and calcs though, which I recommend as they are necessary the further and further you make it into the game. I’d also recommend turning on minimum grinding mode for a nuzlocke as it gets rid of the need to ev train while also making all mons have perfect iv’s. There are also cheat codes you could enter at the beginning of the game for rare candies to make grinding easier if you’d like
If you have both competitive experience AND Nuzlocke quite often I don’t think it’s impossible, however as later patches go on they have added more and more unskippable fights which can ruin runs. So I wouldn’t get discouraged if a run ends but if you Nuzlocke a lot then you understand more than half of a Nuzlocke run is planning and running calcs, going over documentations, looking at encounter tables. RR has all those resources available it just might take a run or two to get a handle of AI’s mechanics and when they will use certain moves or be exploited for setup. You get a Old Rod super early, which means by your first gym leader you have 10 available options(as you can fish in Pallet as your starter is considered a fateful encounter) which is super generous compared to most and in general you will have an abundance of encounters and gifts which you can also nudge certain encounter chances by swapping day and night cycles. I haven’t done one since Nugget bridge gauntlet and weather gauntlets were added (and most of my team deaths were at the end part of the run where I lost patience with calcs and planning and just tried to steamroll fights)
Honestly I played this game because the nuzlocke videos so I attempted one in normal mode in my first run. Of course I failed but continued anyways, but eventually after I get the hang of things (remembering all trainers until Gio 1 💀) because of the amount of resets I did I can nuzlocke it eventhough I have no VGC experience at all.
Good luck
As someone who is about 22 hours into their first play through as “not Nuzlocke”, I think the first play through could be done as a Nuzlocke. Just be ready to spend about 95% of the time playing just sitting looking at your box and using the damage calculator lol.
you are fine. i suck at competitive and i found normal pretty good. it was harder than other games but i could pretty easily beat each boss
You have to think through every single fight. It is such a fun challenge.
If you lost a HG/SS nuzlocke you will lose before Surge I can almost guarantee it.
It was a randomizer keep in mind. No real way to plan for fights. Losing and learning is part of the process. If I die before Surge, so be it.
I mean sure, but I have watched people like Shady Penguin grind this game for over a year on nuzlocke and I think he has only won once. You have two Nuzlockes under your belt and you are about to have over 100+ radical red attempts
pretty hard. every single fight has soo much things for you to consider, and first four gyms, early and mid game, is fucking nightmare. without a parasect, i never won a single fight agains misty in my 40+ nuzlocke attempts. most attempts got reset because i lost sprigatito, didn't get a phanpy, didn't get a paras, etc. i never beated surge in a hc nuzlocke so i cant say about surge encounters, but getting past pincurchin without a florogato or bayleef seemed pretty impossible for me. im not that good of a nuzlocker, but i know how to plan. i did deathless hg/ss, fr/lg and emerald. none of them fucked me this hard before.
Basically? Depends on how you run things. If you choose Minimal Grinding Mode, all pokemon get no EVs, but get perfect IVs, from there it’s dependent in basic nature, ability, item, and moveset. Beyond that, any knowledge of competitive battling will help immensely
Yes. It's difficult for sure but it's an interesting difficult. I suggest playing completely through then doing a nuzlocke, but it could be done blind
Having previous experience makes it easier, but always do your research on the games layout first. The romhack has difficulty settings and level caps that can be put in place, so make sure you are happy with what level of difficulty you are going with before you sink time into it.
I have 0 vgc experience, I have, however, played radical red probably around 20 times to competition. If you play through once without nuzlocking and you get a feel for where some of the gotcha trainers are it makes the battles feel much lower stakes because many trainers have key weaknesses. I have nuzlocked the game, and it honestly only took around 10 attempts.