After more than a year and thousands of community attempts, Pokemon’s hardest challenge has been beaten.
If you’re familiar with Pokemon challenge runs, you’ve probably heard of Kaizo Ironmon. The ruleset was, for a while, considered to be the hardest thing the community could come up with. A fully randomized run in which enemy trainers’ Pokemon are far stronger than they would normally be, and the trainers themselves are smarter. You’re also only allowed to have one Pokemon at a time. That means none of the switching that’s a key part of normal Nuzlocke runs, which dials up the challenge.
But then players started beating Kaizo Ironmon, so the rules were made even harder. Super Kaizo Ironmon adds to the challenge by banning any ‘setup’ moves – those which do no damage and only serve to buff your Pokemon’s stats, and are also a key part of many Nuzlocke runs. Similarly, stat-buffing items are banned after the final gym, as are almost all hidden items.
To make things even more complex, Super Kaizo Ironmon limits your ability to change your Pokemon. While normal rules allow you to ‘pivot’ to a new champion during every route, in Super, you have to take your (random) pick from Oak, and then you have to change to a new Pokemon mid-way through the game. In FireRed and LeafGreen, this has to be done in the Safari Zone.
It’s a cruel and unusual ruleset that really only exists to challenge the most patient top-level players. It’s so challenging, in fact, that its creator makes sure to point out that “this is not meant for everyone” right at the start of their rulebook. As its first anniversary rolled around – only for no-one to have publicly beaten it – there were concerns that it might be truly unbeatable. While there’s no official tally, this is a game mode so difficult that the vast majority of runs don’t make it out of Pallet Town, and the community thinks it’s “easily” surpassed 100,000 combined attempts without a win. Until now.
Over the weekend, streamer Reimi finally took down Gary Oak on his 8,502nd attempt. He did so with a Pokemon that a fellow runner said was “a monster […] with stats/moves nearly handpicked to do it.” That monster was a Crobat with some excellent stats and coverage, and yet the run still came down to the wire – Reimi was forced to use a Full Restore to get through the run’s last two Pokemon, and was helped along by some big RNG when Gary’s Rayquaza rolled Substitute off Metronome, consigning itself to a slow death by poison before it could get a proper hit on Crobat.
For a ‘mon this strong to come so close to death at the final hurdle is a reminder as to why some in the community worried that Super could never be beaten. Even Reimi’s reaction is disbelief – “there’s a reason why every time people ask me ‘can this do it?’ I’m like, ‘I dunno, man’ […] I legitimately thought we’d be playing this for years.”
The hardest Pokemon challenge isn’t a Nuzlocke, it’s playing one of the RPGs in a language you don’t speak with an absurd list of rules and exercising every time you mess up.
