Pokémon Nuzlockes are fun, so let's Randomize them!

Some time ago one of my friends asked me If I wanted to join him and another friend at “racing” a bunch of Pokémon games with them, and then at one point we stopped racing and put our teams on Pokémon Showdown, to see who had the most broken I mean, strongest team.

The twist (there were two of them), was that he wanted us to do Nuzlocke runs and that the games were Randomized.

See, Pokémon themselves are data. What determines whether or not you get a specific Pokémon in a specific place depends on certain values, the moves they have depend on other values, their genders depend on values, nature, and so on.

A Randomizer takes those values, puts them on a magical blender and then spews out a game that’s basically the same… except that everything changes.

There are limits you can put into how much the game changes, for example, you can just change what moves Pokémon can use and learn or decide to only change what they evolve into or if you really want to, you can decide to change their types too.

If you’re feeling like playing spaghetti you can also decide to randomize everything, but at that point you’re just playing roulette with the world so why would you.

The other thing he wanted to do is a Nuzlocke, which basically consists of catching the first Pokémon that shows up in every route, giving them a name and if any of them faints then its dead and has to be taken out of the team.

That’s a thing people do when they feel like Pokémon isn’t that fun anymore on its own.

Combined, those two different things can make a very fun and challenging game to play with or hell on earth. Basically, if your luck completely sucks, you can end up facing Pokémon that will destroy your team with some over powered moves or that end up having just the right move that kills your guys, or you could just end up finding broken Pokémon that will make you fly through the game and destroy your opposition.

If you’re like me then you’ve got the first.

We’ve been running through Pokémon: Soul Silver right now and my experience with it has been nothing but a painful, slow crawl, as I try to survive the bombs this game throws at me.

Yes bombs. When I said that any Pokémon can learn any moves I meant it. With the randomizer, more Pokémon can learn Self Destruct/Explosion, which kills the user and deals a lot of damage to the enemy.

There’s a reason why I said my luck is terrible, the chances of several Pokémon learning self-destruct in a randomizer are not that high, it’s possible (but not likely) to get to the point where every single thing you see blows up. Unless you’re me.

Normally, these aren’t moves easily available to any Pokémon, but because the randomizer did its job right… Well, I’ll let you see the box of the dead for yourself.

It’s not all bad, I got to catch some mons I wouldn’t really use under normal circumstances and I ended up loving most of them, which made it somewhat hard once they started dropping like flies, but also gave me a stronger sense of victory when I succeeded at something.

Sadly, I didn’t get to win this time, as I was defeated in the final Pokémon gym, the last stretch of the journey, to a critical attack no less. Basically, the gods in charge of randomly generating numbers hate me and my guts and decided to strike me down, lest I do something that makes me happy.

I kept going after I lost, mostly out of spite (to the NPC that killed my last creature) and because I wanted to see how hard the rest of it all was (It was easy, really easy).

Still, this adventure as a whole was enjoyable. And I did get a lot of terribly great moments from both my friends and my own game, so it wasn’t all for nothing.

Here, let me show you some of the most interesting creations from the randomizer:

This here is one of the greatest heroes I’ve ever seen. This creature has carried me through most of the game and ended up dying right at the end, the second last death to be specific.

He died to a Dog that knew Karate, who ended up breaking his jaw into a trillion pieces. (Not exactly how it happened but sounds cooler to me)

This here is CrmsonF* who is named after… nevermind.

Crimson here died just like she lived. Fast.

Scizor’s don’t have Impulse as their ability, which made her somewhat broken when she first showed up, it lets her increase her speed every turn (potentially acting faster than anyone else after a short while) and also had access to a lot of strong moves thanks to randomization.

She, sadly, died to another Crimson. An agent of the number generation gods, because I can’t have nice stuff. (Actually, it was my fault).

Kittkat’s a Luxray, under normal circumstances they’re somewhat lackluster. See, when they made the normal Luxrays they made a strong Pokémon that used physical attacks… that learns almost no useful physical attacks whatsoever.

In here though? She has an amazing ability and a surprisingly great pool of attacks. Singlehandedly responsible for murdering thousands of enemies this run.

Finally, we have Steve Harvey.

On the right, Steve Harvey. On the left, Steve Harvey: Golden Experience Requiem, a joke a couple of my friends made when we first saw him. GE sadly died shortly after appearing, leaving the world with the non-gold version of Steve Harvey. Many tears were shed.

This is just a few of the Pokémon I’ve caught on this run, but there’s a lot of them with their own stories inside these boxes. Stories of glory, of dying like heroes, of blowing up, and so on.

Truly, randomizing before a Nuzlocke run presents you with a unique adventure with highs and lows, unfair stuff and completely broken moves that will make you go oh that’s gross.

So, if you’re looking to have some unique experiences, go give a randomizer a whirl and try a nuzlocke for yourself. Maybe you’ll end up blowing up too, maybe not, who knows? In the end, I think you’ll end up having fun.

All photos are screenshots, taken by me during my own gameplay.