Why is Nuzlocke so Entertaining?
Pokémon is a franchise known all around the world. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who hasn’t seen Pikachu at least once in their life. The first games in this franchise came out in 1996 for the Gameboy which were titled Pokémon Red, and Pokémon Blue with an anime called Pokémon in 1997 that followed the adventures of Pokémon trainer Ash Ketchum or Satoshi if you watched the original Japanese dub.
Even to this day nearly every year a new game duology and a new season is announced for the series to break sales records. However, every year, it receives the same criticism especially from its most die-hard fans, which is that the game is too easy.
Now getting into difficulty of games is a can of worms for another time, but I do want to focus on what the community did to try to fix this common complaint. The Nuzlocke challenge.
The Nuzlocke challenge was started by Nick Franco in a series of comics he made known as Pokémon Hard mode. There are just two rules for the challenge in the comic which are:
1. Release a Pokémon if it faints.
2. Have to catch the first Pokémon in each area and nothing else.
As time went on the community decided to add two more rules which were:
3. If every Pokémon Blacks out, then you need to start the game over.
4. Every Pokémon caught has to be given a name.
The rules are fairly simple, but it completely changes the way the game is played.
Now before I go into more detail, I think a little background about my experience with Pokémon would be nice. I started off my Pokémon journey with Leaf Green on my Flame Red Gameboy Advance SP and fell in love with the world and franchise almost immediately. From the opening cinematic of Gengar and Nidorino fighting one another, the epic music on the main screen, being able to play as a girl, catching my first Pokemon, collecting all 8 badges, beating the Elite Four, collecting legendary Zapdos (My electric chicken goat for real), and facing off with the heartless genetic mutation known as Mewtwo. I loved everything about Leaf Green and the world it provided.
I liked playing through the games till Gen 3 with Pokemon Emerald after which it switched over to the Nintendo DS, which I never ended up getting. I dropped off fairly early from the series, but I always liked seeing the buildup for the next game, and would often use my Pokemon Leaf Green or Emerald games to give region specific Pokemons to my friends with some even paying a fee for me to find them and level them up to a certain level. Insane how my first way of earning money was to literally play Pokemon for others haha. However despite not actively playing the games I too could notice that as years went on every new generation felt like it followed the same pattern.
You would get your Pokémon with interesting designs, some stupid designs, and a gimmick that Game Freak would try for one year and abandon almost immediately. (RIP DynaMax, you were gone too soon). I too started to fall into the mindset that Pokémon is the same game just being released year after year. With constant complaints of the game getting easier and easier as the years went on, it never really managed to grab me back and it became a franchise I avoided.
What really turned me around on the idea of Pokémon was a small indie streamer called Ludwig. He released a video of a ROMHACK someone made for him called Mogul Platinum. It was a romhack made especially for Ludwig with the main character sprites resembling the streamer and the rest of the trainers being his friends or people incredibly famous in the Nuzlocke community already. Ludwig had added an interesting rule which is that he would name every Pokemon captured after a viewer. However if that Pokemon died he would not only have to release the Pokemon, but ban the viewer as well until he finished the game. It was a genius way of getting viewers to care and feel included in the run as it wasn’t just Ludwig that would suffer if he wiped out, but them too if they had a Pokemon named after them.
After watching that video, the core Nuzlocke rules seemed like such an interesting departure from the normal Pokemon rules. I watched the Jaiden Animations video about her run and several of Alpharads videos as well. What enamoured me was how unique each of these runs were despite them all playing mechanically the same game.
So many of these videos reminded me of playing through Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne. Nocturne scratched that itch for me that Pokémon was never able to after I turned 15. It let me collect cool sick looking demons, but the combat system was deep and complex and forced me to think 5 moves in advance to try to defeat a tough boss. Even if I had a strategy and tried to plan out all my moves, I could still get my ass kicked with one wrong move, which kept the game exciting and satisfying. I always thought about why Pokémon and SMT led to such different experiences while playing and I always put it off to "It must be the difficulty difference" and not think about it more.
All that created this longing to go back to the Pokemon franchise and see if it was as fun as the videos made it out tobe. I started playing Ultra Sun on my 3DS and started off playing the game blind with the Nuzlocke Rules, which ended disastrously. What I thought was just a great way of upping the challenge of a children's game actually turns out to be this intensive test of understanding mechanics and memorization.
It was at this moment where I think I found out a deeper reason for why they feel so different and why Nuzlockes are so entertaining. Well, the added difficulty helps, but I propose the main reason is the chance for....
Emergent narrative.
For people who don’t know emergent narrative, or "procedural narrative" is any Video Game storyline that is not written embedded into the game by its developers but emerges from the player's interactions with various gameplay subsystems.
In simple words it’s the story generated by playing the game and not present in the game itself. Remember the time when you were on the last level of Super Mario Land, but the Gameboy light was blinking signaling low battery. You didn’t have a charger in sight, but you were in the zone. You make your way through knowing you only have one more attempt before you Gameboy dies. You set off and dodge obstacles as the light starts blinking faster. You start counting the seconds you have left before your Gameboy dies as you see the flag in front of you. You reached the flag and the game saves! That is an example of an emergent story.
Another common example is playing a game where players need to manually save. Imagine playing System Shock 2 and getting attacked by this monkey over here! You try to fight it off, but you lose, oh well at least you can go back to your save, right? Wait…you did save right? Aw dang it :( You turn off the game to never touch it again. Emergent Story.
Emergent Storytelling makes it powerful for the person playing the game. This is their experience of the game and its unlike anything that others have played with before. Usually with Pokemon you do have people have their own stories the Pokemon that they relied on and how they beat trainers in different ways, but by adding stakes on top of those systems it adds weight and consequences to each action.
Nuzlockes are goldmines for these stories because of the rules that are set up.
Rule #1: Release a Pokémon if it faints.
This rule immediately adds stakes to the game. Your childhood strategy of overleveling your favourite Pokemon and keeping them front and center is no longer viable as any random critical hit could be its final moments. All your effort in raising them and leveling up disappears in an instant as you release them into the great void. This prompts players to keep all their Pokémon around the same level. This ensures you can switch over to other Pokemon even if it’s to block a fatal attack to one of your favourites . This also makes players more cognizant as to how they decide their team compositions. Suddenly your Pokémon roaster instead of looking like 3 of your favorite Pokémon who are over leveled and 3 just there, the entire roster of Pokémon become viable options to add to your team. You need to pick and choose Pokemon that are ideal for upcoming battles. You start prioritizing type match-ups, learning how enemy AI’s work and even start using status effects. (THATS INSANE).
This rule also encourages using Pokemon you may have not wanted to before. That Beedrill that you never used because it scares the shit out of you (Yes that's from personal experience. No, I will not elaborate.) that you put into your team to have a Pokémon in all 6 slots could be the one that saves your run.
Rule 2: Have to catch the first Pokémon in each area and nothing else.
Traversal becomes its own challenge as well in the game. Due to the fact that you can only catch the first Pokémon along a route makes something as simple as going into Grass a strategic decision as well. Do you walk into the first patch of grass you see, or should you try to get as far in the route as possible to maybe have the chance to get something better later on?
The requirement of catching the first Pokémon on a route forces you to change up the way you think of team compositions and promotes a deeper and better understanding from the game as a whole. It also adds an element of chance and randomness as it'd be foolish to throw away an 8 hour run just because you got a Pokémon you've not used before. You add that Pokémon to the team and learn more about it as you play the game and get a better idea of what that Pokémon does.
This phenomenon almost reminds me of when failing a game check or state is made fun or leads to such an interesting gameplay opportunity that you continue on even though you "failed" according to the game. Disco Elysium has pretty much mastered this as even failing a simple event like asking a child a question about a hanging corpse can result in you acting like an absolute man-child losing your mind. It’s an insanely funny interaction that you would’ve never received otherwise and while the game calls it a failure for the role it gives you a unique perspective of the game and gives your character more attributes and characterizations you may have not gotten otherwise. You tend to fall out of the habit of save scumming and instead become more free to experiment and break free from your preconceived notion of what the game wants from you.
Even if something doesn't pan out the way the player wants it to, they must use their knowledge or dig deeper into systems to keep the run alive and try to make it out whatever situation they are in. By forcing players to engage with other systems and learn more about them, the rules actually start giving players more freedom in making strategies and engaging with the game they haven't before. They've been enlightened and shown the deeper intricacies of the system and can then use them to their own advantage based on the limited resources they have on their person.
The reason is because players have to avoid their dominant strategy and instead focus on more viable strategies. You could over level one Pokémon and try to go through it with some luck but getting to a point where you over level to one-shot everything, but a run is essentially over if that Pokemon goes down unless you want to restart that whole process over. By exploring and trying out more viable strategies keeps the game fresh and interesting as it forces players to play in a way they may have not thought of before.
Traversal isn't a challenge for just catching Pokemon. You also need to keep in mind trainer positions and where your rivals may pop to make your life hell. I used to like the strategy of just letting my Pokémon get their ass handed to them and go back to the Poke center to re-heal and try again. That strategy is no longer viable because of how important each Pokémon is at this point. It’s a creative way of maintaining tension and keeping players on their toes while promoting the usage of items like HP and PP heals.
It makes it more cerebral and thoughtful with each and every move that player must make, which forces players to review these systems leading to this cycle of understanding, learning, using, and exploiting that's persistent through the game the entire time. When you get to a new gym, you don't want to head in and just pray your Pokémon happen to be super effective against that gym type. You want to learn what the gym is by talking to people around the area, find out what the gimmick of that area is, and maybe fighting the first person if you are confident enough. This gives you a deeper appreciation of the world of Pokemon and the NPCs around town as well. The pixels you would just run past and ignore to brute force the gym are now actual people you have to pay attention to and see if any strategies emerge and you can even get some tips to avoid fighting every single trainer in a gym making the chances of a failed run ever so slightly slimmer. The guy cheering you on becomes less of an annoying series of button presses and becomes a friendly welcoming face in a den filled with danger around every corner. They have worth and purpose to you making the game feel so much grander and bigger than it did before.
Once you've collected all that information it's usually time to re-shuffle and remake a team that can go toe to toe with that leader. Some people also use guides to see what the leader might have and counter pick according to that, which some may say is cheating, but the Heuristics Tree is still being climbed and players still have to engage with the system and play within it's rules to ensure victory. Just knowing the Pokémon a leader has isn't enough, the moves it uses could change, it won't use the same moves in the same order, and it becomes a varying degree of chance that can throw everything into jeopardy.
Rule #3 If every Pokémon Blacks out, then you need to start the game over.
Each battle feels like a game of chance no matter how overpowered your Pokémon might be. Random Encounters in Grass become terrifying when going back to the PokeCenter after a tough battle. Escaping becomes an actual option to protect and save Pokémon making items like Poke Doll or Smoke Ball vital.
You want to pick and choose your battles in such a way that you know that you have a good chance of winning. In case you don't know, Pokémon has a chance of declaring an attack as a critical hit which does more damage, and it also has a scale where it could be doing anywhere from 85 - 100 % of the damage calculated using cold hard math. Now randomness in games when done wrong can be a total pain in the ass especially when you don't have control over it or there's no way of influencing it. It can make the game feel like a set of isolated events happening instead of part of one cohesive system. What Pokémon allows you to do however is make subtle changes to the power scaling and damage done where now the randomness is a way of adding tension and keeping a sense of mystique in the game. If everything was calculable then you could math your way out of the whole game and as we know humans will science the fun out of any game, so that randomness adds some stakes to the battles as well. It's dynamic and keeps players on their toes so they can't just sit back and rest on their superior planning.
Battles instead of feeling like just a button mash area now become a check for the player to see if they have the proper way of tackling this problem put in front of them. Gym Leaders feel more like puzzles now trying to teach players something and waiting to poke holes in a player's plan, which makes them feel so much more intimidating and threatening. You question your items held, the Pokémon in your party and start thinking about things like "Do I use an item to increase my damage, or do I use an item that increases my defense if I know the enemy will attack first?"
By stress testing these things out players get an even better understanding of the systems and are given the opportunity to see any blind spots this team composition might have. If a player blacks out at a battle to a gym leader or their rival due to a particular move or condition that the player hasn't thought of, you can be damn sure they will remember when they have to restart a run, they put 20 hours into.
The rule leads to more methodical play styles as well. You look at battles less of a one on one battle, but rather a team v team battle. You see the bigger picture and develop strategies so that you minimize your Pokemon loss while maximizing damage as a whole. You can sacrifice a low health Pokemon while reducing an enemies defense to ensure another Pokemon is able to finish the battle keeping the casualties to a minimum. One dies for the rest to survive which is where the 4th rule comes in.
Rule #4: Every Pokémon caught has to be given a name.
Look at any run through of a Nuzlocke challenge and you will see one Pokémon appear as a champion for the run. A Pokémon who stood up and ensured a win during a moment when all hope was lost. The Pokémon who would come clutch at the end of the fight and combined with the love that Twitch Chat had for it, you would find yourself supporting a Pokémon you wouldn't have thought twice about. This is why the 4th rule is such an important addition to the overall experience. By actually naming that Pokémon you assign more weight and value to them as you need to put in some amount of effort to come up with a name and when you use a Pokémon consistently, it no longer becomes a normal Nidoking, but MY Nidoking called Chip instead. It gives a sense of personalization that becomes special for the person playing it and adds to the mythos and grand scale to that emergent narrative being created.
These requirements produce a small IKEA Effect. For those of you who don't know what the IKEA Effect is, it can be condensed down to that if you ask someone to put effort or work into obtaining something the more meaning it has to you. IKEA furniture has to be hand crafted by the customer after buying, but by doing so that piece of furniture means a lot more to you as it gives you a sense of pride and accomplishment. You’re less likely to give it away or return it because you’ve put in the time and effort to create it. IKEA gave you the pieces, but the actually assembling of it was done by you making it your creation that IKEA helped out with allowing the customer to have a better feeling associated with IKEA making them more likely to buy from IKEA as well.
Nuzlockes are a fascinating insight into how just a few simple changes can make players appreciate systems so much more and add depth to something that they would've passed off as a baby game. Everything that the player can do in a Nuzlocke is present in the game itself from the get-go, but the way it's packaged and shown to the player is equally important and by showing them more viable options players will start to engage with them.
If you want to see just how complex Pokémon's damage calculator can be, I actually created one in Excel! You can check it out here. (Currently its only 9th Gen, but I'm planning on adding the rest!)