Announcing Pokemon Scarlet: A Soft Boiled Egglocke The Geekly Grind Edition feat. Emotional Support Ham

Pokemon Scarlet: A Soft Boiled Egglocke The Geekly Grind Edition feat. Emotional Support Ham

Welcome one and all to the first and probably will be the only Geekly Grind Egglocke. The star of the show will be me, PossumCoffee. You see I’m cutting back my hours at work, and thought I’d bring some content to the blog and liven the place up a bit! And everyone like Nuzlockes, right? *crickets*

In all seriousness, I’ve always wanted to do an Egglocke. Furthermore, I’m having trouble pushing through the game on my main file, so I thought doing this instead and sharing it might be a lot of fun.

Pokemon Scarlet is one of the two newest entries in the series…and ooooh cheez-its it’s a mixed bag. One of the most apparent things is Nintendo is working to make these games harder to Nuzlocke as the generations go on. Maybe that’s why I wanted to do it with this generation! With some tweaks here and there, nuzlocking Scarlet and Violet is entirely possible. The biggest challenge is the lack of random encounters, plus with a little (80+ hours) preplanning I have entirely too many random eggs to choose from.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves! First off, if you’ve been living under a rock I bet your question is what is a Nuzlocke? It’s an extremely popular challenge that started with two rules. You can only catch the first pokemon on each route, and if it faints it dies.  An Egglocke, you hatch them instead of catching them.

Now, these rules came out when generation 3/generation 4 were extremely popular. We are on generation 9. So the games have evolved, and so has the challenge. We will be playing with the following ruleset for Pokemon Scarlet (thank you Reddit)

1. Catching Pokémon

1. All Pokemon must be hatched from a random egg.

1. Which egg is picked will be predetermined by random number generator. First I will randomize what number box, then what number egg.

2. The eggs are stored on my husband’s copy of Pokemom Violet. I bred as many different Pokemon as I possibly could with a ditto.

3. The eggs will be shuffled around once before the first round of picking. There’s no good way to do this except manually.

4. Eggs must be hatched immediately upon being traded over

2. You must nickname any Pokémon you add to your party.

3. You may only hate  3 Pokémon (including your starter) to your team at the beginning of the game

4. You may add 3 more Pokémon to your party after each gym or mission (about 20 events before the end game).

1. 2.[ALTERNATIVE SOFTLOCKE VARIANT] If a Pokémon faints...

1. If a Pokémon faints, it goes to the Infirmary.

2. You may revive on Pokémon after each gym battle or special mission (22 in the whole game). These do not stack, so they may only be used right after completing a challenge IF you have a Pokémon in the Infirmary.

3. This mercy rule is designed to limit rage quitting when a Pokémon faints in a seemingly meaningless encounter. It also promotes less cautious exploration in an open world game.

2. Battle rules

1. Change battle settings to "Set" (I don't actually think this setting exists in Scarlet / Violet, so instead you will have to self inforce. Basically you do not get to switch pokémon after one of your opponents pokémon faints. You can switch at any other point in battle, but effectively you have to turn down the free switch. This free switch is not present in competitive battles)

2. No X items

3. No revives

4. No healing items in battle i.e. super soaker

3. Order of Challenges & Over-leveling Limitations

1. The order of the challenges should be tackled in the order listed below. Because Scarlet & Violet are open world but do not dynamically level pokémon... the following is the best order to take on the challenges. If you don't follow the order and level caps then you will either end up beating events too easily or you will be way under-leveled and immediately lose your Nuzlocke challenge.

2. Level caps are set, this means that you cannot enter a gym with a Pokémon that is higher than the level listed. If the Pokémon levels up during the gym challenge, that is OK. I have the list, if you want to be spoiled on the various locations/caps, feel free to go to Reddit page yourself.

3. If a Pokémon surpasses a level cap, it must be boxed until you pass the next challenge.

1. Lose Scenario

1. If your entire party faints in a battle and you have no party Pokémon available in your box, then it is game over.

2. Win Scenario

1. Defeat the Elite Four (and champion?) while respecting all the rules above

Furthermore, in the spirit of The Geekly Grind being article based and my love for the long-lost art of screenshot LPs, this one will be a written/screenshot. It will start off updating weekly on Fridays. If there’s enough interest, maybe I’ll post more frequently. Maybe even stream the Elite Four and end game. And then we’ll do another Let’s Play someday.

For the record, I will not be screenshotting every moment or including every line of dialogue in the game. That’s just a bad time for everyone. Furthermore and I’m not going to lie, the game is ugly as sin and that is very apparent in the screenshots. Not much I can do about that! …it’s so bad. With that in mind, as well as the fact we all share image space here, I will be summarizing and describing in the text as much as I feel is warranted to have a good final product.

So grab your emotional support ham and join us next week for part 1.

Any questions? Post below or join The Geekly Grind discord and let us know.

COMING UP NEXT WEEK

Meet Cid

The road ahead is long, and we’re going to a need a LOT of emotional support Ham