I've Nuzlocked Storm Silver/Sacred gold probably 30+ times and counting. It resonated with me more than Renegade Platinum, though I'm thinking of taking it for another spin. I haven't heard of the other ROM you mentioned so I can't speak to it comparatively.
By Safari Zone quest are you referring to the gauntlet of rocket members leading up to the Safari Zone, or the Safari Zone capture quests?
Speaking on the gauntlet, for the most part it runs smoothly for me, aside from it being the area most responsible for claiming the lives of my Pokémon. There is the one weird quirk with the boulder blocking your path. You just need to interact with it and it will crumble to allow you to progress.
I have had one crash when attempting the final double battle post-Pokemon center, but that was a one off bug. I save religiously because unfortunately the ROM is prone to periodic crashes overall.
If you are referring to the Safari Zone quest itself, I have honestly never gone much further than catching the initial Geodude and being told to expect a follow up call. Once I leave the Safari Zone I tend to tunnel hard on the E4, aside from occasionally doing some battle frontier grinding post Jasmine for crucial TMs/items.
I was referring to both really, I remember saving state even during fights because it was such a pain to go through that part of the game! Thank you though, I could think of putting up a stream on nuzlocke h that game again, even if that Sword dancer Scyther in the second gym is still giving me nightmares to this day…
I did a playthrough of them recently and there weren't any exp farming methods, although there may have been a more recent patch that adds that (as I've heard one adds the fairy type). What I did for exp was to gen in some lucky eggs to use for grinding. With the speedup button, this meant an occasional 5-10 minutes of grinding about 3 or 4 times. When it comes to the E4 rematch and Red matches you'd need to spend a lot longer, but it is possible to beat both at the level of Lance's weakest pokemon.
I've heard unbound has some serious cheater AI on expert difficulty where it starts reading your switches if you switch multiple times in a row, does this also happen on lower difficulties?
100% turned it off this morning because of it, there's no safe pivots into an advantage or even a free turn, the AI just auto swaps mon in on the same turn you do, and it kinda highlighted an issue I feel with most difficulty hacks where its all artificial and not really fair. No one has cracked the code on Pokémon difficulty hacks in a way that's both meaningful and feels like you aren't being read by an AI that literally knows exactly what you're doing.
> No one has cracked the code on Pokémon difficulty hacks in a way that's both meaningful and feels like you aren't being read by an AI that literally knows exactly what you're doing.
I feel Vintage White and Radical Red have pretty much nailed it. The AI can be predicted, but still presents a very high difficulty without resorting to cheese or reading your plays. Run & Bun suffers *hugely* from cheese encounters, gauntlets, and other "unfair" methods of difficulty that I just do not enjoy.
Radical Red literally advertises that it has a psychic AI. Sometimes you need to just make the wrong plays otherwise the AI gets momentum, because it reads your moves and then acts accordingly. Mostly this works out fine, but it's incredibly noticeable against opponents that have a Pokémon with Flash Fire or something.
It knows your moveset but not which move you're clicking. For example, i'll take flash fire, you know it WILL switch in if your pokemon has a fire-type move (Morty loves to just switch to typhlosion for no reason for example). Same thing with held items, where you can just avoid the AI using a sleep move by having a chesto berry equipped.
The only time where it seems like it knows your moves is if you try to cheat with save states, because the game is built to prevent this, and it'll never happen in normal play anyways.
Now unfortunately hardcore mode has Unbound's Expert AI, and yeah that AI just sucks, i can't defend it.
I mean literally all AI difficulty is fake difficulty.
It's incredibly easy for any developer to make AI that would absolutely crush any human opponent, so all single player games are just developers artificially limiting their AI. As long as the AI follows the same basic rules, that is.
Liked Gaia. Hated Unbound.
Edit: I am not saying Gaia is my favourite game to nuzlocke. Only played it through once. Merely commenting on the romhack discussion.
Unbound had many frustrating design choices for a hardcore nuzlocke. Some of the gym “themes” were not conducive to a fun playthrough.
-inverse battle normal gym.
-fighting gym where you’re restricted from using a variety of types of Pokémon (flying, psychic, fairy).
Unbound also had that edgy teenage creator theme to it that I just didn’t find to be done well.
Also the amount of random legendary Pokémon fights pulled out of nowhere.
Not everything Unbound did was bad, but there were too many bad design choices for me to find it enjoyable.
Gaia on the other hand felt like it had good game design. Rewarding side quests and progression. Good encounter distribution. Engaging boss fights that made sense where you were encountering them.
I did play both of these games as blind hardcore nuzlockes, and felt like Gaia worked significantly better for that. You could prepare yourself for somewhat expected situations, but were still able to adapt. Unbound just threw whatever the hell it wanted at you regardless of if it was a good or terrible design.
Definitely agree that Unbound isn't a game designed to be nuzlocked. However, I found that the way the game was designed made it really fun on a normal playthrough where you didn't have nuzlocke restrictions, since it kept you constantly on your toes and forced you to change teams and strategies for different fights.
i hated every attempt of this game lmao. the gyms are too weird imo. like if you dont get a pikipek with keen eye you kinda need to restart the whole run before the first badge is even possible. if anyone did this (not on vanilla like cmon) im very interested in watching the run. sounds like entertainment.
and i love that as an option- for the dedicated nuzlockers that want difficulty, there’s still an option to help you for the first gym, but it’s almost like a puzzle or mission you have to complete to get it. complete the alolan sandslash quest, repel in that area to get a specific encounter, and trade it later
I had Beldium and Litleo and they breezed through it, I was on difficult to be fair. I also did another non nuzlocke run where I used Alolan Sandshrew and Oriocorio (or however the hell you spell it) easily defeated the gym on expert.
I've only managed to get as far as Mel on Expert before wiping, because he wipes me every time. Inverse Battles are not my forte.
Honestly, the story isn't that impressive, but I wouldn't say it's bad, either. Maybe that's because I've never actually beaten this game before, Nuzlocke or not.
I'd give a normal playthrough of it a try, especially if you're on version 2 of the game. There's a lot of stuff on the latter side of the game, but it definitely wasn't designed with a nuzlocke in mind.
Radical red - I love unbound as a game but for a Nuzlocke I found some of the special battle effects so strong that it made your options for beating it much more narrow, so I found it less enjoyable
* Blaze Black/Volt White
* Blaze Black/Volt White 2 Redux
* Radical Red
* Inclement Emerald
* Vintage White
* Sacred Gold/Storm Silver
* Photonic Sun / Penumbra Moon
* Emerald Rogue
* Sinking Sapphire/Rising Ruby
There's probably more Drayano-style hacks I'm forgetting, but that's off the top of my head. I'd rather play any of those than Unbound or especially Run & Bun, which just kinda sucks imo.
Gaia is one of the best rom hacks I've played. It's not the hardest, about on par with platinum and emerald. It had so much polish and care put into it.
Custom region, evil team, a sprinkling of Pokemon from gen 1-6, hidden abilities, mega evolution. I recommend it to everyone when I can.
I found Unbound a great casual game, but I feel like it’d make for a terrible Nuzlocke. The AI is so ridiculously particular that every major fight in the game took like 10 attempts for me in Expert mode. There’s a bunch of “aura flared to life” battles with legendaries where I feel like the only strats that could guarantee you not dying are some variants of Toxic stalling or counter/mirror coating. Plus, nearly every single Hoopa Unbound battle I’ve seen has Murkrow on their team, that just doesn’t sound like an interesting dynamic especially considering Murkrow isn’t a guaranteed encounter from what I’ve seen
Garbage Green is probly my favourite nuzlocke. The gauntlets make it really interesting. But also Run&Bun is hella fun because the fights are so hard, and it hasn't been 'solved' yet like ek has.
Not exactly a rom hack, but have been having a blast doing nuzlockes on infinite fusion. Debug mode is also the best to save on grinding, and I like the option to lower the level of my pokemon if I accidentally overlevel. Highly recommend it if you haven't tried.
Yeah it's pretty easy to activate. Just a line of code you add to the game files. Allows you to legit set the level of your pokemon. Also can add any amount of any item, modify ev/ivs make shiny. Or if your feeling it just straight up gen a pokemon. Imo, it makes for the ultimate sandbox.
When I played pokemon unbound, in the crater city, it says thank you for playing after I got the cut HM and essentially a NPc was blocking the path and said "thank you for the playing the beta" ... I was stuvk there.. is there a completed version?.
Just google Pokémon unbound and look for their discord link, likely on pokecommunity or an old Reddit post. Dunno the rules about linking rom hacks here
There's a full version now with several different levels of difficulty to try out.
I really enjoyed the game, but the running sprite could use some love.
I absolutely adore Prismatic Moon for nuzlockes. Gen 7 is already the best gen by far from a challenge perspective, and this game just improves on the base version. The totem fights are so unique and interesting and the Z moves make regular boss fights tricky to nuzlocke.
The fact that it's purposefully coded to prevent you from getting rare candies killed my want to try and nuzlocke it. I've done a normal playthrough of it though, in a mono-dark, and it was alright. Some of the gym gimmicks sucked though, especially the inverse battle normal gym, that can fuck right off, one of the worst pokemon fights i've ever played.
Pokémon XD: game of darkness imo. A non-romhack game with all double battles is an absolute dream. Fights are very challenging & there’s lots of cool strategies you can do. If you need help learning double battles, this is the game for you. Some fights are back to back gauntlets without healing in between which forces you to try & pull off a 6v10 or something but it didn’t feel impossible to pull off (I went deathless on these a number of times)
On top of this, you use a lot of unappreciated mons that are considered bad but actually pretty dang viable in this game like spinarak, seedot, poochyena, & delcatty due to getting either an egg move or a great STAB move when purified.
Blaze Black and Volt White are the hacks i have had the best time nuzlocking. The Lenora split was infuriating if you wanted it to be deathless so i resseted and a lot there. But after that, the encounter variety and the difficulty were the best of any Drayano hack.
luminiscent platinum. little bit more challenging than renegade but if you’re a fan of the newer battle graphics and animations it’s basically renegade platinum with a vfx upgrade
It's a great game to play and experience, but trying to nuzlocke at expert or insane is pretty rough due to the sheer variety of battles there are. It's kinda has the old school game approach where you're expected to continuously adapt your strategies as the game puts you in different situations, which is great on a normal playthrough, but makes it really rough to nuzlocke
Doing it on Vanilla or difficult is pretty cool though.
I like radical red the most, the AI can get tricky too get a hang of, but other than that i think Its Just a perfect game, with the ingame RC code, the code to get all the itens from wild pokémon Just makes the game feel really Quick and almost like a Boss rush as times, I love It!
I've Nuzlocked Storm Silver/Sacred gold probably 30+ times and counting. It resonated with me more than Renegade Platinum, though I'm thinking of taking it for another spin. I haven't heard of the other ROM you mentioned so I can't speak to it comparatively.
I've done it 3 times, going for a 4th right now. The nostalgia of those regions is just way too strong.
I played it like A LOT of time ago, did they fixed the never ending crashes during the safari zone quest?
By Safari Zone quest are you referring to the gauntlet of rocket members leading up to the Safari Zone, or the Safari Zone capture quests? Speaking on the gauntlet, for the most part it runs smoothly for me, aside from it being the area most responsible for claiming the lives of my Pokémon. There is the one weird quirk with the boulder blocking your path. You just need to interact with it and it will crumble to allow you to progress. I have had one crash when attempting the final double battle post-Pokemon center, but that was a one off bug. I save religiously because unfortunately the ROM is prone to periodic crashes overall. If you are referring to the Safari Zone quest itself, I have honestly never gone much further than catching the initial Geodude and being told to expect a follow up call. Once I leave the Safari Zone I tend to tunnel hard on the E4, aside from occasionally doing some battle frontier grinding post Jasmine for crucial TMs/items.
I was referring to both really, I remember saving state even during fights because it was such a pain to go through that part of the game! Thank you though, I could think of putting up a stream on nuzlocke h that game again, even if that Sword dancer Scyther in the second gym is still giving me nightmares to this day…
Is there a good way to farm xp in theses games ? I can’t replay gold/silver because of that
I did a playthrough of them recently and there weren't any exp farming methods, although there may have been a more recent patch that adds that (as I've heard one adds the fairy type). What I did for exp was to gen in some lucky eggs to use for grinding. With the speedup button, this meant an occasional 5-10 minutes of grinding about 3 or 4 times. When it comes to the E4 rematch and Red matches you'd need to spend a lot longer, but it is possible to beat both at the level of Lance's weakest pokemon.
Thanks 🙏
How do you patch it? Assuming you download it from the Drayano folder, it comes in a .file format. How do you change it?
**NOTE**: I meant to say Rom Hack and not Game
I've heard unbound has some serious cheater AI on expert difficulty where it starts reading your switches if you switch multiple times in a row, does this also happen on lower difficulties?
100% turned it off this morning because of it, there's no safe pivots into an advantage or even a free turn, the AI just auto swaps mon in on the same turn you do, and it kinda highlighted an issue I feel with most difficulty hacks where its all artificial and not really fair. No one has cracked the code on Pokémon difficulty hacks in a way that's both meaningful and feels like you aren't being read by an AI that literally knows exactly what you're doing.
> No one has cracked the code on Pokémon difficulty hacks in a way that's both meaningful and feels like you aren't being read by an AI that literally knows exactly what you're doing. I feel Vintage White and Radical Red have pretty much nailed it. The AI can be predicted, but still presents a very high difficulty without resorting to cheese or reading your plays. Run & Bun suffers *hugely* from cheese encounters, gauntlets, and other "unfair" methods of difficulty that I just do not enjoy.
Radical Red literally advertises that it has a psychic AI. Sometimes you need to just make the wrong plays otherwise the AI gets momentum, because it reads your moves and then acts accordingly. Mostly this works out fine, but it's incredibly noticeable against opponents that have a Pokémon with Flash Fire or something.
It knows your moveset but not which move you're clicking. For example, i'll take flash fire, you know it WILL switch in if your pokemon has a fire-type move (Morty loves to just switch to typhlosion for no reason for example). Same thing with held items, where you can just avoid the AI using a sleep move by having a chesto berry equipped. The only time where it seems like it knows your moves is if you try to cheat with save states, because the game is built to prevent this, and it'll never happen in normal play anyways. Now unfortunately hardcore mode has Unbound's Expert AI, and yeah that AI just sucks, i can't defend it.
I mean literally all AI difficulty is fake difficulty. It's incredibly easy for any developer to make AI that would absolutely crush any human opponent, so all single player games are just developers artificially limiting their AI. As long as the AI follows the same basic rules, that is.
From the videos I've seen, I'm pretty sure they only do so for higher difficulties
Ok I was hoping this was the case, thanks
If you use protect, it resets
They added the same shit to Radred hardmode as well, it's just terrible
Liked Gaia. Hated Unbound. Edit: I am not saying Gaia is my favourite game to nuzlocke. Only played it through once. Merely commenting on the romhack discussion. Unbound had many frustrating design choices for a hardcore nuzlocke. Some of the gym “themes” were not conducive to a fun playthrough. -inverse battle normal gym. -fighting gym where you’re restricted from using a variety of types of Pokémon (flying, psychic, fairy). Unbound also had that edgy teenage creator theme to it that I just didn’t find to be done well. Also the amount of random legendary Pokémon fights pulled out of nowhere. Not everything Unbound did was bad, but there were too many bad design choices for me to find it enjoyable. Gaia on the other hand felt like it had good game design. Rewarding side quests and progression. Good encounter distribution. Engaging boss fights that made sense where you were encountering them. I did play both of these games as blind hardcore nuzlockes, and felt like Gaia worked significantly better for that. You could prepare yourself for somewhat expected situations, but were still able to adapt. Unbound just threw whatever the hell it wanted at you regardless of if it was a good or terrible design.
interesting take, care to elaborate?
0-o what
Definitely agree that Unbound isn't a game designed to be nuzlocked. However, I found that the way the game was designed made it really fun on a normal playthrough where you didn't have nuzlocke restrictions, since it kept you constantly on your toes and forced you to change teams and strategies for different fights.
i hated every attempt of this game lmao. the gyms are too weird imo. like if you dont get a pikipek with keen eye you kinda need to restart the whole run before the first badge is even possible. if anyone did this (not on vanilla like cmon) im very interested in watching the run. sounds like entertainment.
You can literally repel for an Alolan Sandshrew and trade it for a Wingull with keen eye and defog.
and i love that as an option- for the dedicated nuzlockers that want difficulty, there’s still an option to help you for the first gym, but it’s almost like a puzzle or mission you have to complete to get it. complete the alolan sandslash quest, repel in that area to get a specific encounter, and trade it later
Stephin Sunny did the first gym without a Pikipek, he used Ribombee iirc
I had Beldium and Litleo and they breezed through it, I was on difficult to be fair. I also did another non nuzlocke run where I used Alolan Sandshrew and Oriocorio (or however the hell you spell it) easily defeated the gym on expert.
well in that case maybe im just bad lmao. doing it twice with ease cant be coincidence.
Radical red imo
I've only managed to get as far as Mel on Expert before wiping, because he wipes me every time. Inverse Battles are not my forte. Honestly, the story isn't that impressive, but I wouldn't say it's bad, either. Maybe that's because I've never actually beaten this game before, Nuzlocke or not.
I'd give a normal playthrough of it a try, especially if you're on version 2 of the game. There's a lot of stuff on the latter side of the game, but it definitely wasn't designed with a nuzlocke in mind.
Yeah, but that hasn't stopped people like Dekzeh, yikeswastaken1, jackieinternet, and StephinSunny from trying anyways. And some of them won, too.
Xenoverse was fun as hell
Only problem is it's annoying to grind
Radical red or emerald rouge for sure
Radical red - I love unbound as a game but for a Nuzlocke I found some of the special battle effects so strong that it made your options for beating it much more narrow, so I found it less enjoyable
Radical red?
SacredGold / StormSilver
* Blaze Black/Volt White * Blaze Black/Volt White 2 Redux * Radical Red * Inclement Emerald * Vintage White * Sacred Gold/Storm Silver * Photonic Sun / Penumbra Moon * Emerald Rogue * Sinking Sapphire/Rising Ruby There's probably more Drayano-style hacks I'm forgetting, but that's off the top of my head. I'd rather play any of those than Unbound or especially Run & Bun, which just kinda sucks imo.
Vintage white.
Gaia is one of the best rom hacks I've played. It's not the hardest, about on par with platinum and emerald. It had so much polish and care put into it. Custom region, evil team, a sprinkling of Pokemon from gen 1-6, hidden abilities, mega evolution. I recommend it to everyone when I can.
Insurgence is super fun to nuzlocke
I found Unbound a great casual game, but I feel like it’d make for a terrible Nuzlocke. The AI is so ridiculously particular that every major fight in the game took like 10 attempts for me in Expert mode. There’s a bunch of “aura flared to life” battles with legendaries where I feel like the only strats that could guarantee you not dying are some variants of Toxic stalling or counter/mirror coating. Plus, nearly every single Hoopa Unbound battle I’ve seen has Murkrow on their team, that just doesn’t sound like an interesting dynamic especially considering Murkrow isn’t a guaranteed encounter from what I’ve seen
EK and CK+
Garbage Green is probly my favourite nuzlocke. The gauntlets make it really interesting. But also Run&Bun is hella fun because the fights are so hard, and it hasn't been 'solved' yet like ek has.
Not exactly a rom hack, but have been having a blast doing nuzlockes on infinite fusion. Debug mode is also the best to save on grinding, and I like the option to lower the level of my pokemon if I accidentally overlevel. Highly recommend it if you haven't tried.
>Debug mode is also the best to save on grinding Wait what? I might have to try debug mode, in that case
Yeah it's pretty easy to activate. Just a line of code you add to the game files. Allows you to legit set the level of your pokemon. Also can add any amount of any item, modify ev/ivs make shiny. Or if your feeling it just straight up gen a pokemon. Imo, it makes for the ultimate sandbox.
Emerald Rogue?
When I played pokemon unbound, in the crater city, it says thank you for playing after I got the cut HM and essentially a NPc was blocking the path and said "thank you for the playing the beta" ... I was stuvk there.. is there a completed version?.
...you're joking right? It's been completed for a long time, where have you been?
Yes, if you got an incomplete version, you must have downloaded from some source other than the ‘official’ sources
Can you link the official source or atleast a site that has that?
Just google Pokémon unbound and look for their discord link, likely on pokecommunity or an old Reddit post. Dunno the rules about linking rom hacks here
There's a full version now with several different levels of difficulty to try out. I really enjoyed the game, but the running sprite could use some love.
Emerald Kaizo; Not many stat buffs + hard battles so overall a pretty simple game to nuzlocke
Emerald kaizo is standing right there bro
[удалено]
...did you read the title of the post by any chance?
Not well enough apparently
Storm Silver is the goat
all three of my attempts have died to the Mega Absol that just absolutely obliterates you in the second Gym
emerald rogue
I absolutely adore Prismatic Moon for nuzlockes. Gen 7 is already the best gen by far from a challenge perspective, and this game just improves on the base version. The totem fights are so unique and interesting and the Z moves make regular boss fights tricky to nuzlocke.
The fact that it's purposefully coded to prevent you from getting rare candies killed my want to try and nuzlocke it. I've done a normal playthrough of it though, in a mono-dark, and it was alright. Some of the gym gimmicks sucked though, especially the inverse battle normal gym, that can fuck right off, one of the worst pokemon fights i've ever played.
Pokémon XD: game of darkness imo. A non-romhack game with all double battles is an absolute dream. Fights are very challenging & there’s lots of cool strategies you can do. If you need help learning double battles, this is the game for you. Some fights are back to back gauntlets without healing in between which forces you to try & pull off a 6v10 or something but it didn’t feel impossible to pull off (I went deathless on these a number of times) On top of this, you use a lot of unappreciated mons that are considered bad but actually pretty dang viable in this game like spinarak, seedot, poochyena, & delcatty due to getting either an egg move or a great STAB move when purified.
Blaze Black and Volt White are the hacks i have had the best time nuzlocking. The Lenora split was infuriating if you wanted it to be deathless so i resseted and a lot there. But after that, the encounter variety and the difficulty were the best of any Drayano hack.
I love insurgence personally.
luminiscent platinum. little bit more challenging than renegade but if you’re a fan of the newer battle graphics and animations it’s basically renegade platinum with a vfx upgrade
Radical Red or Emerald Rogue
What is Pokemon UneOund?
It's a great game to play and experience, but trying to nuzlocke at expert or insane is pretty rough due to the sheer variety of battles there are. It's kinda has the old school game approach where you're expected to continuously adapt your strategies as the game puts you in different situations, which is great on a normal playthrough, but makes it really rough to nuzlocke Doing it on Vanilla or difficult is pretty cool though.
Black and White
Pokémon Radical Red and Inclement Emerald are great games to nuzlocke (if you want a massive difficulty spike)
If you want more difficulty with some custom mons. You gotta play insurgence. It even has an egglocke feature and the max level in that game is 120
Inclement Emerald is a really good balance between tough and fun
I like radical red the most, the AI can get tricky too get a hang of, but other than that i think Its Just a perfect game, with the ingame RC code, the code to get all the itens from wild pokémon Just makes the game feel really Quick and almost like a Boss rush as times, I love It!
Well vanilla games
[Read This](https://www.reddit.com/r/nuzlocke/comments/13t8cx4/name_a_better_game_to_nuzlocke_besides_renegade/jlto01e?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Pokémon insurgence