Hello and welcome back to my latest bad idea. Sticking with last week’s Pokemon trend, I decided to make use of something I picked up a gaming convention last year for this week’s run. If you ever get a chance to go to the Midwest Gaming Classic in Milwaukee I would highly recommend going. This week I’m going to be playing Pokemon Green. Now what makes this game a challenge is the fact that it was only ever released in Japan. So with almost no knowledge of Japanese I only have my knowledge of the game and the attack animations to serve as a guiding light. I’ve played fully through the Kanto region through various games so I have a pretty good idea how to get around at this point. Since I’m playing the very first Pokemon game there are tons of exploitable things I can do to make my run easier. The first thing is that I’m going to pick Charmander and primarily use him during the run. I’m doing this because Charizard learns Slash at level 36, and slash is a high damage physical move that almost always lands critical hits in Generation One. The second thing I’m going to do is write down what level my planned team knows certain moves so I don’t accidentally skip learning a move I need. Third is catching Articuno and Zapdoes when I have access to them because it will help me cover my weakness in the Pokemon League. Fifth and finally I’m going to get a Nidorino that knows Horn Drill, a low accuracy one hit KO, and buy a bunch of X-Accuracies to exploit the glitch that allows Nidorino to have 100% accuracy when using Horn Drill to defeat anything Charizard, Articuno, and Zapdoes can’t handle, my final two team members will just be there so I have Pokemon that can learn the HM moves needed to navigate through the game. While these strategies could be applied to a normal playthrough of Pokemon Red or Blue, it’s an interesting challenge to see if basic reading ability is truly needed to enjoy a game like many boxes suggest.

Hello and welcome to my bad idea of the week. As I said back in my ‘Low Dex’ Run of Pokemon FireRed, you might have expected me to do the classic Pokemon Nuzlocke someday. You’ll be glad to know that today is finally the day I do a Pokemon Nuzlocke. For those that are unaware, a Pokemon Nuzlocke is a special rule set that can be used to make any run of a pokemon game much more difficult. The two main rules are that if a Pokemon faints, it’s considered dead and cannot be used for the rest of the game, and you can only catch the first Pokemon you catch in each area. There’s a plethora of extra rules one can apply if they desire to modify the experience. In the past I only played about half of a Pokemon Pearl Nuzlocke up until my main damage dealer had fainted and I didn’t feel like grinding my Pokemon to catch up. Level grinding and knowing the biggest challenges a game has to offer are two of the most important things you need to form your strategy. For example, if you pick Charmander in Pokemon FireRed, you should either make sure you have a pokemon with a fighting type move or overlevel your charmander to the point where it can sweep Brock’s entire Rock type gym or your run will end right then and there. For my run today I’ll be playing Pokemon Emerald and using Mudkip because he’s a viable pick for the entire game. In retrospective I should have added the No Duplicate Pokemon clause so I didn’t get three Poochyenas in a row. Overall I think it’s a fun playstyle if you want to mix things up for your next pokemon run.

Hello and welcome to this week’s bad idea. This week I’m going to ignore one of the most iconic lines in gaming history “Gotta catch em all”. That’s right, it’s finally time for some Pokemon  challenges. If you’re a follower of my blog and are a Pokemon fan you probably would have expected me to do a nuzlocke as it’s the most common type of challenge run within the community. Well have no fear, that day will come in early April 2020. For today, we’re doing what’s called a ‘low dex run’ which means I’m going to complete the game while catching as few Pokemon as possible. I got the idea to do this run because a youtuber called Alpharad played through the entirety of Pokemon Emerald with just a Mudkip. This time I’m planning on playing through Pokemon FireRed. I decided to start my playthrough by choosing Squirtle as he is very bulky and can learn Surf, which is both needed for for overworld navigation and is a good move to use in battle. Unfortunately, I will need to catch at least one other pokemon to use the HM moves Cut, Flash, and Strength. Squirtle can also learn a set of moves that is tailor made for taking down the Elite Four and Champion at the end of the game. As I went through this run I realized how easy the early pokemon games really were if you could overlevel our starter to insane levels by the endgame. When I first tried this run out over the summer of 2019 I believe that I had beaten the Champion with a level 79 Squirtle. If you want to mix up your classic Pokemon experience I would highly recommend giving this run a try.