The Kutty Katt's Thoughts

Beginning through First Big Rival Fight

Pokemon Renegade Platinum is one of the best and hardest rom-hacks of all time. It has so many quality of life improvements and increases the challenge of playing Pokemon. Combining that with a Nuzlocke creates an exciting challenge. For my Nuzlocke I am using the following rules: no items in battle, pokemon levels cap at the highest level of the next gym, can only catch the first pokemon encountered on each route, gift pokemon do not count as an encounter, if a pokemon faints then it has to be boxed forever, and if needed an HM mule can be used. Let’s get into this journey.

We start in our small town of Twinleaf Town. Our hyper-active friend Tamt rampages into our room and demands money for being late. He rushes us out into the wild and tries to get us to do some bad things, but luckily an old man named Professor Rowan prevents us from making a terrible mistake. He allows us to pick out a Pokemon from his brief case to take. I of course choose the best of them, Chimchar, or as I like to call him, Dipper.

Dipper and I immediately have to fight Tamt and his new Piplup, he said he is too cool to name his Pokemon. The battle comes down to the wire but a weakened Dipper is able to win with one final scratch. The next day Tamt convinces us to go to the Lake and we run into this weird guy, he was so creepy that we rushed over to Professor Rowan’s lab. While there he gives us a pokedex and we start our journey. After telling our mom about our new life goal she gifts us an Eevee, who we name Carmy. After battling Dawn she provides us with PokeBalls and our run officially can start.

Given our new found passion of collecting all (the first one on each route) of the Pokemon we decide to backtrack and see what we can find. We find a Bidoof we name Abby, a Starly we name Leo, and a Zigzagood we appropriately name Ziggy.

We soon get to the big city of Jubilife City, where Dawn greets us again. We run into some weird guy who is tracking down Team Galactic. We need to heal up after some tough battles along the way and while we are in the Pokemon Center a news reporter gives us a quiz and challenges us to battle. After we beat her we are gifted Charmander, Bulbasaur, and Squirtle. Who we name; Nelly, Pope, and Noster. Before we go and make our way to the next gym we have a another encounter we can get north of the city. We run into the a Caterpie we name Pencil. Pencil is pretty weak at this point so it is going to stay in the box. Also in the town we are given an egg that hatches into Pichu that we name Cody, and Cody will be the key to victory against our rival Tamt.

Tamt is waiting to battle us as soon as we leave the city, and while his team doesn’t seem super dangerous, we don’t have a great answer for his Thick Fat Munchlax. We have no fighting types on our team so we are going to have to go at it with neutral attacks. Piplup also has Peck which will wreck our grass type pokemon that we bring to challenge it. But none of that matters if we can’t take out his Starly, and Cody will do that for us.

Cody being a baby Pokemon puts his stats at a drastic disadvantage to Starly, however, Cody has one trick up his sleeve. His special ability is Static. We are going into this battle hoping for a paralyze. We start with Cody and Starly hits us hard with a quick attack to below half, but just as we had planned Cody paralyzes Starly. We get off our Charm to harshly lower its attack stat. With the lower attach stat, Cody should be able to survive one more quick attack unless it crits. and as Starly makes its attack it powers through Paralyze and hits us…..down to 2 HP. Cody lives on and uses a thunderbolt to hit Starly down to just above half. With Cody’s life on the line we need to switch, and with Starly’s lowered attack we can safely send out Abby for the second part of our plan. As we send Abby out, we luck our and Starly can’t move. Abby, the Bidoof, starts its overwhelming strategy of Rollout. After a Potion Starly goes down in 3 hits. Munlax comes out next but stands no chance to Abby’s powered up Rollout and falls in 2 hits. Piplup comes out next, and with Rollout reaching its limit we need to switch. We have Pope, the Bulbasaur, waiting for his chance to shine, but with Peck being a massive problem, we came up with a better plan. I send out Carmy, the Eevee. Carmy has the move, Covet. So we start with that and steal the Piplup’s berry. After that we start spamming sand-attack. We get 3 off before Piplup finally hits us. We start our counter-attack and go for a bite, it does less than I would hope, and Piplup is able to over-come the sand in his eyes to hit us below half, but then the stolen berry activates and gets us above half. I realize that Covet is going to be a much stronger move than bite, and one more Covet get’s the critical hit and Piplup goes down.

With Tamt defeated and my party surviving our first real test, it is time to start our journey to the first Gym, find out how we do in Part 2!