What Makes the Pokemon Nuzlocke Challenge So Great?
This weekend, I began my first venture into what is colloquially known as a “Nuzlocke” run of Pokemon Crystal. I picked Crystal because it was the game I played most as a kid. Whether I was stuck at a summer camp, going on a road trip, or just killing time before school started, I always had Crystal with me. But with the exception of a brief nostalgic emulation of the game on my computer in early high school, I had totally abandoned the franchise. So when I picked up the Nuzlocke run this weekend, something special happened.
Before I unpack why this run of Pokemon felt special, I want to debrief you on what I mean by Nuzlocke, because as I learned over the course of the run, many people mean different things by the term. I played Crystal with the rules from Bulbapedia, which mainly entail three primary requirements: (1) If a Pokemon faints in battle, it is dead and you have to release it, (2) you can only catch the first Pokemon you encounter in an area and have one chance to catch it – if it faints or escapes, you can’t catch another one, and (3) if your entire party is knocked out, causing a “whiteout,” you lose the game.
The first rule is rather straightforward and adds stakes to the game, which many consider to be too easy or at least easy to master. You cannot let a Pokemon faint, so it changes some of the default strategy you might normally adopt through a traditional playthrough. The second rule forces an element of randomness into an otherwise methodically party-based game. Pokemon is centered around deliberately catching and training a team of battlers that you pick and choose between based on stats, abilities and personal preference. The Nuzlocke challenge throws all deliberation out the door; what you catch is what you’re stuck with. And the third rule essentially removes all do-overs and checkpoints from a game that you could otherwise record a save state at any point throughout the playthrough.
These elements of challenge – changing strategy, adapting to randomness, and removing second chances – brought to life an otherwise ancient game from my childhood. Not only was there a vein of nostalgia being tapped throughout the experience, but there was an element of experiencing something deeply intimate and familiar as if for the first time. Early on in the playthrough, I encountered Pokemon like Spinarak and Stantler, who I had no idea how to properly train because I skipped past them in my childhood. It was bizarre and hilarious to learn new things about a game where, for whatever reason, I can still remember where the invisibly placed hidden items are throughout the map. It made me reconsider that my hundreds of hours in Crystal still hadn’t brought me to try out every Pokemon and that I might have missed some hidden gems. (Most of them were not hidden gems.)
There was also an underlying anxiety that permeated my Nuzlocke run, which I did not remotely anticipate when starting the game. From the very first battles, I was paranoidly seeking reassurance from my Twitch chat, wondering aloud if “this is where the run dies.” Simple, low stakes encounters caused my palms to sweat in a way that seems humorous in retrospect. At the same time, there were some definitive markers of genuine challenge that I faced, namely Whitney’s Miltank who devastatingly attacks with Rollout in a fierce gym battle. Ironically, I wiped Whitney’s Miltank out without losing a single Pokemon. Yet when I encountered psychic Pokemon, which I didn’t have any reasonable counter against in battle, I lost some of the most important party members I had been training in a single hit.
Losing a Pokemon in a Nuzlocke run is unique to the traditional Pokemon experience in the sense that you can’t just bring it back to the Pokemon center to revive it. It’s gone as soon as you make a careless mistake or receive bad luck from the game itself. Couple these high stakes with the tradition of Nuzlocke runs to mandatorily nickname each Pokemon caught, so as to strengthen emotional bonds with them. As our own Ben Vollmer has previously written, you develop an affinity for a Pokemon who is carrying most of your key battles and then out of nowhere it’s gone forever. I don’t mean to play this up for rhetorical effect, it’s genuinely awful when you go to release the Pokemon.
There’s a lot more that I could describe about how the basic rules of Nuzlocke runs work and how they affect your playstyle, but what caused me to turn these thoughts into writing were the optional rules that I ended up adopting. For context, I began playing this Nuzlocke run as a donation incentive for the Epilogue Gaming Summer Marathon, where we raised over $2,500 for the AbleGamers charity. As a way to bring in donations to the charity, I decided I would allow my viewers to donate a specific amount to impose any optional rule they chose. They could donate for a 30 minute rule or go all in for a permanent rule. Of course everyone went for the permanent rules.
The first (optional) rule imposed on my Nuzlocke run was “no fleeing.” People who have played Pokemon will know that in the random wild encounters throughout Crystal, you have the option to attempt an escape from a battle – whether you’re at low health, are underleveled, or don’t want to take the time to battle. From the outset, my run had an additional rule that anything I encountered must be fought. If I was out of healing items or was plagued by poison ticking off my health points, then I was out of luck. Luckily, it was relatively easy to adapt in the early game to this rule.
The second rule imposed on my run was a little rougher, but is apparently an unspoken or unwritten standard for many Nuzlocke runners: “Battle style: Set.” By default, you play Pokemon Crystal in the battle style known as “switch,” which enables you to swap out Pokemon in longer battles where a trainer is going to swap out their own. I had little-to-no experience with the “set” battle style, which locks your first position Pokemon into place unless you manually opt to swap it out, which raises the risk that it will take damage. You lose the freebie that “switch” gives you.
The third rule imposed on me was arguably the reason my run died so early on: “no items in battle” (exempting Pokeballs). All of a sudden, I couldn’t heal in battle or cure any status ailments. I’ve never been one to excessively use items in RPGs – in fact I’m a bit of a hoarder – but this felt like one of the few remaining lifelines of the normal playthrough had been severed. Even if my pack was brimming with super potions and antidotes, I had to grit my teeth and pretend like it was empty. There are a number of occasions where I could have saved a Pokemon if not for this rule.
And here we arrive at the final two rules that were imposed and almost certainly shortened the lifespan of my first Nuzlocke run: (1) “No leveling Pokemon above the next gym leader,” and (2) “limit the number of Pokemon in your party to the number of the gym leader’s.” I was fortunate enough to have these rules brought into my run on two separate days – albeit by the same person. The first day I was faced with capping off my Pokemon’s levels before fighting off Bugsy, the second gym in the game. With a limited number of Pokemon I could catch due to basic Nuzlocke rules, I had to train up anything I had but simultaneously not train it too much, otherwise I couldn’t use it in the gym battle.
The final rule came into effect the day after I was level capped. In addition to worrying about not training my go-to Pokemon too much, I then had to think about who to exclude for important encounters. Fights that I normally breezed through became intense, psychologically distressing encounters. I arguably lost my starter Pokemon, Totadile, due to this combination of rules.
An honorable mention for these optional rules was the generous addition of “gym mercy,” which essentially enables a reset button from your last gym badge as a way to keep the Nuzlocke run alive. However, when it came down to the moment when I lost all my Pokemon at once, I realized that this rule invalidated what I considered to be the spirit of the Nuzlocke: challenge. Even allowing myself one do-over removed the satisfaction I was developing over the course of the playthrough, and I decided to pause my Nuzlocke running where it should end.
So how did my run die? Shiny. Gyarados. If you had given me five predictions of how my run would end, I would never have considered this scaly bastard. When I encountered Gyarados in the Lake of Rage, I knew I was underleveled by a considerable margin. But I surfed up to him and prayed to the RNG gods that we could catch it. After all, I needed something that could fend off against the next fighting gym that only had two Pokemon.
You can watch my demise unfold at length here.
Right out of the gate, I put Gyarados into a state of confusion, making him self-inflict damage. I started battering down his defenses and then put him to sleep just above the danger zone of knocking him out by accident. One ultra ball. Two ultra balls. I ran out of those. One great ball. Five great balls. Twelve great balls. I ran out of those, too. With only Pokeballs left in my arsenal, I sank eight futile attempts to grab him instead of knock him out. And foolishly, by that point, I had started sacrificing lower leveled party members. All at once, in a stubborn attempt to catch a better leveled Pokemon, I lost the entire party. The run was over.
When I “whited out,” I was a bit shocked. But as aforementioned, there was a kind of serenity to the fact that I was abiding by the rules – or the “spirit” – of the Nuzlocke challenge. Even though someone had donated to enable the “gym mercy” rule, I knew in that moment that this was a moment to learn and improve, not to make excuses to keep it going. I closed the game without saving, leaving more than a dozen hours of progress behind.
I started this Nuzlocke challenge run as a bit of a gag because I knew many people who follow Epilogue streams get a kick out of them. I had never streamed a Pokemon game, despite recently sinking several days into Pokemon Let’s Go: Eevee. But I was playing this Nuzlocke run for other people, not myself. Over the course of the run, I ended up playing it for me. This sounds absurd, but there was a kind of “honor” to going down in a fruitless attempt to cut corners by catching that red Gyarados. It felt good to do the right thing and end it there, as distressing as the process towards my run’s demise actually was. And I realized that this is something worth doing for anyone who considers themselves even a casual fan of Pokemon.
I avoid challenge in video games. But this was a challenge that I grew to crave. It reinvigorated a tired old game that I hadn’t thought of playing in almost a decade and turned it into something that I felt like I was playing for the very first time. Not only that, it added a kind of replay value to the experience to the point where I can confidently say I will do several more of these Nuzlocke attempts in the future. As someone who rarely replays games, that’s a profound realization to reach at the end of a single attempt at the Nuzlocke challenge run.
I know there are other people who are, like I was, either bored with their childhood Pokemon games or avoid challenge runs because they prefer the casual playthrough experience. I implore you all to try it out. I didn’t understand why Nuzlockes were so great until I dove in headfirst myself.
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