Mystery

Team Worsties (Reupload) Sometimes I get immensely bored playing something I’m good at, so I like to challenge myself by intentionally playing badly. For this, I was playing Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, Red Rescue Team, and trying to see what ways I could make it as painful as possible. A few rules I initially made up were: No buying anything (simple enough.) No friend areas outside of the tutorial ones/given away as rewards (last is unlikely considering RNG needed to get them) No items outside of the ones received in dungeons Start a dungeon ASAP, minimum rescues (So I’d probably be at silver rank the entire game.)

And basically my run was dependent on RNG. So far, it went well enough and I was under the assumption the run’s first hardest hurdle would be at Groudon considering the earthquake users I’d need to fight on the way down. It wasn’t Groudon. It was Zapdos.

Not very exciting but by using attract and tail whip I managed to whittle Zapdos’s health down enough to defeat it. I only still have like 3 recruits (minus absol) but then I unlock Mt. Moonview after the fugitive arc so I can in theory get more recruits… it just seems weird. The hill of the ancients and Xatu are sort of underutilized outside of like, sky tower, and parts of the post game, but post game sort of does that for all characters outside of the recurring ones. Also, Gengar. What a prick, getting an angry mob to cause the team to be actively hunted down to be killed when he’s the human reborn. Then again, he runs a team called team meanies… Fugitives arc went swimmingly well all things considered. The hardest part was honestly getting through Lapis Cave because the nincidas aren’t weak to Thundershock. Mt. Freeze is kind of interesting because Absol is such a non character you can leave him behind in the friend area but he’ll still show up for cutscenes. Didn’t work though because I got killed. Managed to finish afterwards and then it was business as usual. Groudon is probably going to suck though.

(This one was originally multiple post parts.) Last time, I asked myself the question “what if mystery dungeon was kinda tedious to play with a bunch of self imposed rules like minimal friend areas and no shop purchases and having to throw everything out for every single dungeon?” And today, months later, I got that answer. Groudon kinda had me trapped in a cycle where I kept going “yeah, I can do it!” then I’d fail, then a few missions later I’d do the exact same thing. I did a lot of missions to make up for being a failure. The team ended up at gold rank. I learned that the game kind of generates interesting pairings the more missions actually get done, and also drops off high level mons in places like tiny woods more often. I also ended up with the wonder mail friend areas spawning naturally, which surprised me, I thought they were like, postgame exclusive. So after doing all of that and even getting smeargle through howling forest I went like “surely I can beat groudon this time?” The answer was that no, even at my level, I was very close to getting two shot. But then, like other runs I’ve done for MD, I recruited a friend! Onix is still useless though. Didn’t manage to do much, but it’s the thought that counts.

I think it was the adrenaline rush from beating Groudon that caused me to basically chaotically throw myself at Sky Tower multiple times without any training or prep, just me going “we ball!” and that worked. somehow I got to the summit around my third attempt. With only Solrock. That repeatedly died. Honestly, the recruit rule that was supposed to be Nuzlocke rules kind of failed once I got to magma cavern because I intentionally started making Absol move further away so I could get a lot further with him farming EXP. My bad. After that though, I’m pretty good with this run. Not gonna do the postgame because the first game’s postgame gets rid of the partner unlike other games so it’s kind of flatter. Just the fact that I can do it minimally is enough, but it took way longer than my usual runs.