All posts by Dadogking

Alright, so, here’s the gist. I’m playing through a partial PokéMarathon, going through every region. I’ve played through Fire Red, Heart Gold, Alpha Sapphire, Platinum, White 1, and White 2. (Could have done a full marathon but… playing through every region more than once didn’t sound fun)

Starting in Gen 5, I introduced a new rule to up the difficulty. When fighting a Gym Leader, my team needed to match in numbers. This alone didn’t change the difficulty of the gen 5 games much. They were harder, yes, but if I continued to do this, the future games wouldn’t change in difficulty much.

So then, Gen 6 came around. And I decided that I would now give myself a rotation of Pokémon, rather than sticking to six.

Combining the rotation with the party size limit has made XY into a legitimate challenge. Not only has my team been forced to a max of three for each gym leader after Grant, but even when I’m allowed a full team, I can find myself struggling due to lower levels. I constantly have to switch team members to keep them from falling behind, and it’s been really fun! I’d sometimes end up boxing my starter just so that lower leveled team members could catch up.

So my recommendation if you find modern Pokémon games too easy? Try balancing a rotation of 10-11 Pokémon!

I have a simple question to ask. What are some of the worst Pokémon you have ever used in a Hall of Fame team?

I don’t mean in terms of how much you like the Pokémon, but rather, how useful (or rather, useless) they were.

I’d like to start off my list with some dishonourable mentions.

• Lumineon: I used this Pokémon in Platinum, and while it was definitely the weakest link of the team, it also defeated Cynthia’s Garchomp, so I can’t put it in my top 4 worst team members.

• Pidgeot: Used in my most recent playthrough of the Johto remakes, Pidgeot started strong, but got worse and worse as the game progressed. Still, it got some use, which is more than I can say for the main 4.

• Dachsbun: Used in my first playthrough of Gen 9, Dachsbun had it rough. Dachsbun had the stats of a stall mon with the moveset of a physical attacker, and as a result, would end up hitting 4x super effective moves, and just… dealing half health at best. Still, Dachsbun wasn’t useless, so it gets to stay as a dishonourable mention

And now, in no particular order, my four worst team members.

• Meganium: A starter Pokémon so useless that I was forced to put an exp share on it to prevent it from falling behind. It was useless against the gyms, it was useless against Team Rocket. And it was useless against the Elite 4. It took until Kanto for Meganium to get a shred of use. The Meganium I used in my most recent Johto playthrough is by far the worst starter I will ever use.

• Vanilluxe: This Vanilluxe was caught before the Raihan battle in my first playthrough of Shield. It got KO’d in one hit and did barely anything in the league, and definitely didn’t do anything against Rose. The most use this cone got was against Eternatus… and I had much better suited team members for that.

• Zangoose: Used in my most recent playthrough of the Unova sequels, Zangoose had two problems. It was caught late, and had the same role as another Pokémon on the same team - Sandslash. Swords Dance sweeping. Only issue is, Zangoose was too frail to reliably set up, so Sandslash outclassed it in every way.

• Seviper: Used in my first ever Emerald playthrough, I now know never to use this Pokémon again. It has great stats in both physical and special attack, but having poor speed and awful bulk leads to a wasted team slot. It was cool to bring Seviper to the Hall of Fame, but I shall never do so again.