There's a new ROM Hack I wanted to play, Pokemon AquaBlue. It's a revamped and enhanced edition of Kanto, with new towns and features in it, along with a new story. It's basically like a sequel game to FireRed. The player character starts out in Saffron City, and can choose Joto or Hoenn starters as well. However, there's one thing that completely KILLS any interest I have in this game: The forced Nuzlockes.
For those who don't know, a Nuzlocke Challenge is a self-imposed challenge in Pokemon playthroughs to artificially make the game harder. If a Pokemon is defeated in battle, instead of being knocked out, it counts as being "dead" by the rules of the challenge. You also must nickname all of your Pokemon, to force an emotional bond or rapport with it, in case it gets knocked out/killed. Lastly, you can only catch the first appearing Pokemon the first time you enter a new route or area, and cannot catch anything else outside of this.
Now, if people want to put these self-imposed rules onto Pokemon games, so be it. I don't have a problem with people doing Nuzlocke Challenges. My thing is, Nuzlockes ARE FUCKING STUPID. One of the biggest flaws and drawbacks in Pokemon is the RNG, or random number generator, which is just a fancy way of saying luck. Many things in Pokemon rely purely on luck and statistics, such as what Nature your Pokemon will be, what Pokemon will appear in tall grass, if a Pokemon will be a Shiny (very rare color alternate palette), getting a critical hit, status condition side-effects happening from attack moves, attacks hitting or missing, and so on.
So to me, building a challenge around random-ass fucking LUCK, is beyond stupid. There's NO strategy involved whatsoever, and your chances of success or failure or based entirely on RNG/luck or over-preparing due to that bad RNG/luck. And the things that aren't left up to luck, are just tedious or boring, such as buying a bunch of Potions and Repels and such. It's simply not fun, and instead of being fun-challenging, is actually just tedious, monotonous, and to me, BORING.
I get people want Pokemon games to be harder and more challenging, but to me, there's far better ways of doing it than some bullshit random luck playthrough where if you get critically hit just once or whatever, and your Pokemon faint, you lose it forever. That is just so FUCKING dumb! You could do a "non evolving" challenge, or a "only crappy Pokemon" challenge, or a "only one Pokemon" challenge, or a "no items during battle" or whatever. But there is no strategy behind Nuzlockes. It's just trying to overcome shitty luck and doing it in the most tedious and boring way.
So getting back to AquaBlue and it being a FORCED Nuzlocke... What the fuck, dude? This ROM Hack was made by a super-woke California Zoomer named Criminon. And I find it very ironic that a "He/Him" pronoun idiot would deny players CHOICE and stick them in a BINARY of "Nuzlocke rules or don't bother playing my game." It's otherwise a brilliant and well-made ROM Hack, but FORCING players into this dumb, super-shitty, "if your Pokemon faints, it's just fucking dead and hours of your life are wasted. Oh well, LOLZ!" mechanic otherwise ruins the experience. He didn't leave it as an option you can choose at the start of the game; it's BAKED into the fucking ROM Hack. There is no way to turn it off. I almost never have my Pokemon faint anyway, but "almost" isn't "never." To lose something you put hours into, just because the creator is all, "I like Nuzlockes" is so shitty. So "BINARY," if you will.
And unlike actual Nuclocke challenges, this isn't optional. He coded it into the game. And I didn't even know about it until I looked online. I thought it was a bug. I had a Spearow raised to level 10 before it got critically hit and fainted in battle. Then I see it's a ghost sprite and healing it at the Pokemon Center didn't wake it up. It's permanently dead. This also happened right away, even though the creator says it's not a 100% occurrence. Well, when you rely on RANDOM FUCKING LUCK, it's never going to be the statistics you claim it is! 20% for you can be 95% for me, cause it sure as shit happened almost every fucking time I tested it! This is also why when you do competitive battling in Pokemon, you don't tend to rely on moves with 90%, 85%, 80% etc. accuracy. Because they WILL miss when you need them to not fucking miss, most often!
Like I said, the shittiest thing about Pokemon is how much of it is left up to random bullshit luck. How the computer opponents can get Critical Hits 25% of the time, and I can go entire fucking playthroughs never getting a Critical Hit once. I can catch more Shiny Pokemon in a playthrough than one of my Pokemon critting anything. I can use 30 PPs of Ice Beam and in those 30 times, no Pokemon will ever be frozen by it.
Nuzlockes fucking suck, dude. They're SELF-IMPOSED challenges, for a reason! They shouldn't be coded into an actual fucking Pokemon game! Who wants to lose dozens of hours of progress because the computer got a critical hit on you, or froze you? Fuck Nuzlockes and fuck ruining an otherwise exceptional ROM Hack, dude.
I really wanted to enjoy this game, as new Pokemon games (everything on the Switch) SUCK SO BADLY. But you know what's even worse than forced Exp. Share over-leveling your team and having no way to turn it off? Having your team PERMA-DIE from random bullshit luck. Congrats; you found the one thing worse than mandatory Exp. Share.
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