As of last night, I managed to accomplish something I’d been trying for months – completing the Battle Tree in Pokémon Ultra Moon. This means 50 straight wins in Single, Double, and Multi battles.
For those who don’t know, Pokémon battle facilities are notorious for bullshit. Some call them the challenging end-game for veterans, as opposed to the easy main story for kids, but this isn’t accurate. The battle facilities are hard for one and only one reason – they require streaks of victories. In the Battle Tree, if you lose anywhere before Battle 51, you lose. Period. Start over from 0 and fuck you, LOL. Now even if we assume the battle facilities don’t rig the RNG against the player, the chance of something, somewhere going wrong over the course of 50 straight battles is quite high. And all it takes are a few misses or flinches to cost you hours of progress. To give you some perspective – I am not a competitive Pokémon player. I play the games for exploration and story and characters. When I build teams, I take a very Elite Four Karen approach – I field my favorites and don’t want to think about strength. Each Pokémon in my main story team has an in-universe backstory and a real-world reason I chose it, reasons which have nothing to do with competitive viability. I just don’t have the kind of mindset that you’d find in someone who thinks about Pokémon competitively. Despite this? Over 516 Super Multi battles, I had a win rate of 96.3%. It just so happened that something, somewhere went wrong before Battle 50 in the first 466 of those. What does this mean? It means any given battle in the Battle Tree is not hard. The battle facilities aren’t challenging – all they do is stack the odds against you. And the developers did this on purpose. To illustrate: there is one potential enemy Walrein whose only attacks are OHKO moves. OHKO moves in Pokémon are kind of like OHKO moves in other RPGs – they have a small chance to one-shot the enemy or they miss and do nothing. So this Walrein will only win by being lucky a few times. Again, we’ll assume the Battle Tree doesn’t rig the RNG in this Walrein’s favor. There’s still a legitimate chance it’ll connect with those OHKO moves – and that’s it. You lose. Start over from 0 and fuck you, LOL. This reminds me of when I was in middle school and I declared that to “beat” me in Pokémon, one had to win 3 straight times. There is, of course, no such rule anywhere – I was simply such a little child (and not confident in my skills) that I felt the need to resort to stacking the odds against potential opponents. And even in the depths of my childishness, I only required a 3-streak. The Battle Tree needs 50! And these (I assume) aren’t middle schoolers developing this game; these are grown professionals! As a side note, someone did challenge me to a battle and I won so handily the first time that he went back, GameShark’d himself 2 shinies of every species (one male, one female), gave all of them ridiculous stats (e.g. >900 Attack), and challenged me again. I guess I really didn’t need the childish odds-stacking. Anyway, to wrap up: Pokémon battle facilities are composed of no less than 120% bullshit and clearing the Battle Tree was, by far, the least fun I have ever had in my ~23 years of playing this series. 0/10 would not recommend. BUT I DID IT SO FUCK YOU BATTLE TREE LOL. …and just in time for Legends: Arceus to land this Friday. I’m really hoping this game is great. Comments are closed.
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