Both fulfilling and stressful in equal measure
If you’re a frequent Skybox reader, you’ll have seen an article last month from my colleague Joe Richards. Said article was discussing Joe’s experience going through his first Pokémon Nuzlocke, which I coached him through. It was an interesting time – it taught me beyond a shadow of a doubt that I absolutely should not be guiding a first-time Nuzlocker through a game.
The first thing we did was decide on what game we wanted to run through – Joe went with Pokémon Black due to a combination of nostalgia and familiarity. I then outlined the rules: no items in battle, no overlevelling, nicknames are mandatory, and Joe can only catch the first Pokémon on each route. Joe loaded into the game, my voice in his ears, trying to train him on what to do. I was giving him details on upcoming major battles (but never too much, as I didn’t want to play for him), making sure he understood the type charts and telling him what encounters he might get on any given route. It’s important to note my intention with this first run – I wasn’t expecting Joe to finish it. He’s a casual Pokémon fan; he’s not an expert. He’s not somebody who has ever done this before. But I wanted to see how far he could get, and after picking Oshawatt as his starter, we went off on our journey.
It was all going fairly well up until the fifth gym, shockingly enough. We’d managed to get some decent encounters, and while we’d lost some people, we’d not lost anybody who really mattered. But then we hit the fifth gym, and we lost our starter to a critical hit. What hurts more is that we lost to a totally avoidable fight, and from there it all cascaded into the end of our first run.
The thing about coaching somebody through a Nuzlocke is that you cannot be too overbearing. Being too overbearing means that you’re basically playing through them, and that’s not the purpose of a coach. So I got to see Joe make mistakes that were totally avoidable in real time without intervening. But that’s all part of the learning curve – if he ever decides to do another Nuzlocke, then he knows now what to avoid, how to manipulate his encounters so that he always gets what he needs, and how to turn RNG from random chance into something malleable.
But I wasn’t quite finished with Joe. I was curious if he’d have a better time in an alternative version of a Nuzlocke: a Soullink. A variant on a Nuzlocke that ties your Pokémon together. You both get one encounter in each new area, you both have to catch the Pokémon to use it, they both have to have the same name, and if one dies, the other dies too. What this results in is an incredibly stressful game that had Joe and me constantly nervous, especially with the version of Pokémon Emerald we were playing – a version with Pokémon from Generations 1 to 9.
Our first run was fine, honestly unremarkable. It was Joe and I trying to learn how this was going to work, since it was our first Soullink, and catching the Pokémon we could. It is worth noting that we fully randomized this version of the game – we wanted to introduce an element of chaos into our lives, which led to some very late-stage Pokémon showing up early (have you ever spent close to twenty minutes throwing a ball at one of the legendary roamers just to lose them? We have). It wasn’t until I got cocky and stubborn that we had to restart the run – I came across a Regieleki, and I refused to leave until I caught it or died. I died, but I’d like to try this again sometime. See how far we can go, and see whether we can actually beat a game playing like this.
As I said at the start of this piece, I don’t know if I should be coaching somebody through a Nuzlocke. I’ve played a bunch of difficulty hacks, but I wasn’t sure whether or not that translated to being able to help somebody through a game, or whether I’d essentially just be an annoying backseat driver. I still don’t know the answer to that question. But I do want to do it again – it’s incredibly rewarding whenever somebody gets through a roadblock, or whenever they catch a Pokémon that you weren’t expecting them to be able to catch. It’s absolutely devastating whenever we lose somebody who has been with us the entire journey. But I want to go back, I want to learn, I want to teach.
Above all else, I really want to coach Joe through another Nuzlocke down the line. I want to be able to see him grow in real time. I want to be there when he has his biggest victories, and I want to know what he has learned throughout his journey. It’s an extremely rewarding experience, being able to tell Joe all about my experiences with Pokémon and having him use it to his advantage. I just hope that this isn’t a one-off and that he tries a Nuzlocke again at some point in the future.
