Bloodsport! Pokemon Reborn Fighting Monorun

[Nordling]

Hi everybody!  

 

Before tackling the issue at hand, let me just say that I am very pleasec to say that this is my first post on this forum.  Now, I'm no rookie to Reborn - I've been around here since 1 year or so, having completed playthrough on vanilla reborn and being currently halfway through the hardcore version (Seriously, @Commander, this mod is so cool, congratz).

 

I also wanted to congratulate the author, @Amethyst, on creating such an interesting game which challenges me on every corner contrary to mainstream games. 

 

So let me say that I am excited to announce my very first recorded monorun playthrough! (My first monorun ever in general)

 

Why have I decided to do such a playthrough?

 

Well... Some thought put into team-building is always beneficial in pokemon games. Even more in reborn, where you have limited access to strong pokes so you need good team synergy to muscle through particular fights sometimes it's not enough in hardcore and you need just to be lucky. Therefore I always analysed my teams strengths & weaknesses and tried to build good all round team which can act as a core while rotating a bit with decidated pokes for an important battle. Before Gen 6, fighting types were always present in my team. Now, with them fairies introduced, fightings fell far from grace (in my opinion, its only a personal view, dont hate) - dark can easily be countered by my own fairy (which offers better coverage anyways and doesnt have such a demanding movepool needs). Steel and ice is nearly always handled by a fire type and offers additional resistance to fairies, and rocks are often countered by a bulky ground type. Having in mind that you can squeeze only 6 pokemon into 1 team, I rarely have place for a fighting type nowadays, being in my opinion much more niche in gen 6. In gen 5, I always found fightings an universal pick that can always find their 5 minutes in a battle, while with them pesky fairies running around, it seems much less viable (1 more move needed since dark coverage move is walled as well + 1 resistance/weakness more). While I was letting my fighting type go due to trainsition to Agathe Circus, an idea struck me - why not try whole playthrough with them fighties? I always liked them and was feeling kinda nostalgic when I boxed my Scrafty in favour of Clefable (damn those fairies!). And thats why Im here

 

Basic info

 

1. Hardcore or vanilla? I think that hardcore with mono fighting run will be too much. I cant see myself muscling through whole Corey's team with a Crobat as ace on hardcore I barely beat him with carefully picked team. Thats why Im gonna go vanilla.

2. Self-imposed restrictions:

            Battle shift setting always on 'set' - no changes as opponent is switching out a fainted poke.

            No items usage in battles best feature of hardcore version.

3. HM mod - i just hate HM slavery

4. And finally, pokes! As some of you may probably know, there are no fighting types available before Julia! Also, I already played through the game with Infernape and Emboar (fire/fight is one of those type combos that havent lost their viability during gen transition ), Blaziken is just blantantly OP and I just hate Chesnaught i) pitiful STAB coverage ii) unattractive stats distribution iii) i just dont like him generally. Moreover, playing with only 1 pokemon through the whole beginning sounds boring as hell! Therefore, I decided to:

      a) swap the starter for a decent, however not outright OP fighter i.e. Riolu

      b ) adding 2 (or 3?) pokes to the team in the beginning, however not so amazingly powerful (just to be compliant with the pace of Reborn).

 

 

So, this is my proposition for the beginning team so far: (Im gonna hack da game  and add them to the team since trading 3 pokes in the beginning would be somewhat gamebreaking)

 

Riolu

Nature: neutral

With move bullet punch, however I will treat it as egg move (I will replace it with another move asap and reteach it with move relearner)

 

 

Mankey

Nature: jolly

 

Poliwag

Nature:neutral

 

 

So! Those are my preliminary suggestions and introduction.

What do you think? Do you have any ideas for maybe 4th poke for the team? (Not something game-breaking tho)

 

I do hope for some feedback

Edited October 26, 2017 by Nordling

[Nordling]

Oh well, I had a somewhat free evening so I just gave it a shot.

 

Let me introduce you to the new PC

 

Spoiler

Named her Jackie in tribute to Jackie Chan (its a fighting monorun after all), which is also short for Jacquelline, so it's all ok.

 

So here's the team:

 

Spoiler

As the playthrough is named Bloodsport, which is one of the most famous martial arts movies with Jean Claude Van Damme playing the leading role, I thought the name will be appriopriate.

Also, meet Boxer and Junior

 

 

After some uninteresting tackle fights with local noobs trainers, I decided it was time to take out the meteor duo. Oh boy, I shudder at thought of mono-bug Shelly and mono-poison Corey.

Spoiler

Talk about type disadvantage...

Still, with Boxer and a focus energy under her belt, and a couple of fury swipes, we were able to beat 'em. However, Van Damme was close to fainting (which is what we're trying to avoid since it evolves based on happiness and his basic form, Riolu, sucks hard.)

 

With all of them exp givers trainers mopped up, and all the hidden shards gathered, it was time to talk to a peculiar green-haired douchebag Individual.

 

On a side note, I'm very positively surprised by Boxer's usefullness. Fast, strong-hitting and with early pseudo-setup move of focus energy, she was able to secure crucial KOs when normally fighties are in disadvantage i.e. bugs/poisons. Junior, on the contrary, performs below expectations as of yet. I hope that in the future, with rain dance + swift swim + water STAB + evolved + sea incesnce love you Ame he will be more of an asset to the team and less of a liability.

Edited October 26, 2017 by Nordling

[T.O.W.A.N.]

Interesting. There was one guy who did a mono fighting run on hardcore mode. He mentioned that toxicroak was the GOAT. Anyways, good luck on your mono run. Though this mono run might be tough. Perhaps some more fighting types might be useful? Especially when the time comes when you must fight Shelly and Corey. If you're interested, I can offer you some good fighting types. 

Edited October 27, 2017 by T.O.W.A.N.
Grammar

[Anti_Hero]

Good luck, sawk will save you in some fights

I did a mono fighting in regular reborn and I have to say, Adrien is a bad match for you 

[Yagami]

First of all , Where's Blaziken??????

Also you can paste the link of image like this:

I didn't upload them instead they are embedded automatically.

Also I recommend uploading your screenshot in another website and put the embedded link here.

Because the attachment limit is 1.95 MB in reborn website so you won't be able to upload many images.

 

[J-Awesome_One]

Yay! More Mono Types to follow! Good luck!

[Nordling]

1 hour ago, Yagami said:

First of all , Where's Blaziken??????

Also you can paste the link of image like this:

I didn't upload them instead they are embedded automatically.

Also I recommend uploading your screenshot in another website and put the embedded link here.

Because the attachment limit is 1.95 MB in reborn website so you won't be able to upload many images.

 

Ok, ill try to do that. Do I just post a link or do I add some special brackets? I'm not much of a forum dweller

Blaziken would make this playthrough a walk in a park with bulk up & speed boost + good STAB combo so i decided against it

 

2 hours ago, Anti_Hero said:

Good luck, sawk will save you in some fights

I will see if I use him. What worries me is that he doesn't learn anything besides fighting type moves, which could be a problem.

 

6 hours ago, T.O.W.A.N. said:

Interesting. There was one guy who did a mono fighting run on hardcore mode. He mentioned that toxicroak was the GOAT. Anyways, good luck on your mono run. Though this mono run might be tough. Perhaps some more fighting types might be useful? Especially when the time comes when you must fight Shelly and Corey. If you're interested, I can offer you some good fighting types. 

Well, hardcore fighting monorun sounds very frustrating to me and I aim for this to be entertaining for me & you so I wont go for that. Yeah, 3 gyms after grass leader will definitely cause me some headache. Im not sure whether Ill add some new fighty outside of the usual you can get. I worry that it might make Reborn playthrough less of a Reborn playthrough, IYKWIM

 

1 hour ago, Awesome_One said:

Yay! More Mono Types to follow! Good luck!

Thanks

Edited October 27, 2017 by Nordling

[Anti_Hero]

He is useful because of sturdy+counter 

 

He beat some treats that otherwise I couldn't bear with my fighting mono

[Nordling]

7 hours ago, Anti_Hero said:

He is useful because of sturdy+counter 

 

He beat some treats that otherwise I couldn't bear with my fighting mono

Hmmmm, sounds interesting!

 

 

Edited October 27, 2017 by Nordling

[Nordling]

Spoiler

OK., you self-appointed king of Jerktown, bring it on!

 

Lotad on lv. 10? Time to check out my new move Force palm.

 

 

Taking down Lotad didn’t cause much of a trouble top dog with lv.10 Lotad?

Snivy behaved as if she didn’t even wanna try and went for wrap. After couple of potions, she went down without causing hardly any damage. Time for da big boss.

 

The fight was intense and Van damme barely made it. However, due to some lucky paralyses here and there, I was able to 3-0 Fern. Talk about top dog! Unfortunately, screenshot got messed up so no final screen (you just gotta believe my word on this).

 

Next up, teamed up with Fern, Florinia and Julia I swear to god, she tried to doom us all we managed to break through to command centre of Team Meteor’s base. Here, an unpleasant surprise awaited us with some high ranking officer wanting to take us down. Without time to prepare we were attacked – Julia and Florinia fought the officer while we, me and Fern, were challenged by duo called Aster & Eclipse.

 

Spoiler

Ha! They would like to? They freakin’ assaulted me. Okay, Boxer, you’re up.

 

That doesn’t look good... Boxer went quickly down and managed to get one karate chop off on Elekid (who is a freaking beast with this field-boosted shock wave). You’re on Van Damme, take down that Ele and let Junior finish off Magby.

 

Oh yeah! They focused on utterly useless Lotad while Van Damme mercilessly finished off ele with a precise force palm IN THE FACE. Now let’s switch to Junior and take over the base.

 

Huh? Don’t huh me. You can’t touch Junior with Magby, outcome was obvious

With Aster & Eclipse down, The Officer couldn’t do anything but run. Julia went crazy mad again and exploded the whole facility! We barely made it out alive...

 

After the incident, Julia invited me to the gym to fight for a badge and went on her way like nothing happened you crazy b....Having obtained a certain very sweet addition to pokegear – field dex – from Florina, we went to the gym to face Julia hopefully she won’t explode me in the process

Here is the current team pre-Julia (Van Damme with cheri berry, which can be found in a certain box under the Bridge , and Junior ofc with his sea incense). I hope that the tadpole will be useful in any way tho... even hypnosis won’t work since pokes can’t be put sleep on electric field >.<

 

Current team:

Spoiler

 

 

Let's see how our fighter team will fare in its first Gym Leader battle!

 

Spoiler

I am sincerely worried that she will blow us into oblivion with her explosive tactics

 

First one up is Helioptile, which easily goes down to Boxer’s karate chop. Next one will cause much more trouble, it seems.

 

Hmmm, fury swipes did not a high amount of damage contrary to Emolga’s acrobatics...

 

Seismic toss of Boxer seemed as the most safe option. Acrobatics took down Mankey, Junior came up. Emolga was cured by potion – in the meantime Junior skilfully landed hypnosis.

 

Emolga slept like a baby while Junior whittled down him with bubble. Julia tried desperately to save him with potions, but Junior was relentless and finished off Emolga, learning new move Rain dance in process. Major roadblock was taken care of – I was worried that Emolga will sweep me.

 

Junior with rain dance set up managed to take down 1 Voltorb and put next one in revenge kill range for Van Damme.

 

2nd Voltorb and Blitzle went quickly down to strong Force palms damn this aftermath ability. It all came down to Van Damme vs. Julia’s Electrode

 

Electrode proved to be too strong... Force palm took only 33% of its HP while 1 Charge beam almost fainted him. With next Charge beam the match was unfortunately over

Ok, it was all because I was afraid that we will get killed by all those explosions and her shouting all the time... It was a bit overwhelming and guys got a little confused as well. We trained some more after that loss and we will be back for more!

 

I was thinking to start next time with Van Damme, OHKO Helioptile with Force palm, and then counter Emolga's acrobatics with well, Counter  Hopefully, take down one more Voltorb with Force palm as aftermath finishes Van Damme off.

 

Anybody got other ideas on how to take her down? Maybe I should go for 4th fighter for the team? That Emolga walls me hard + Electrode is seriously hard to beat. I would love to hear your thoughts

I think I could use timburr since he learns Rock type moves and Pancham doesn't bring anything special to the table...

 

Stay tuned for more.

Edited October 28, 2017 by Nordling

[Yagami]

How about using focus energy+any move with your Boxer.That might help against Emolga.

If you think it's too hard then you should get a fourth member.
Also can you make the screenshot larger? Since you have put them in spoiler it shouldn't be any problem.

[Nordling]

1 minute ago, Yagami said:

How about using focus energy+any move with your Boxer.That might help against Emolga.

If you think it's too hard then you should get a fourth member.
Also can you make the screenshot larger? Since you have put them in spoiler it shouldn't be any problem.

I was thinking about that strat as well. Set up on Helioptile which cant do much vs me as his attacks wont hurt me very much and I can counter glare with cheri berry and then hopefully land some crits with fury swipes on Emolga. I will see how I will tackle this issue

[Anti_Hero]

How about one of the 3 starter fighting types? There is the defensive grass fighting type and the son Goku of Pokémon you can still choose

 

I would choose Chimchar (you can either do a physical or special oriented one) it is a good Pokémon with good coverage and relatively fast 

[T.O.W.A.N.]

Yo, if you're interested, I can offer you a hawlucha, a heracross with rock blast, a technician breloom with bullet seed, a chimchar/monferno/infernape, a timburr, and a gallade. 

[Yagami]

3 hours ago, T.O.W.A.N. said:

Yo, if you're interested, I can offer you a hawlucha, a heracross with rock blast, a technician breloom with bullet seed, a chimchar/monferno/infernape, a timburr, and a gallade. 

This is the 1st gym.If he wanted that much broken power,he would have just chosen speed boost torchic.

[T.O.W.A.N.]

1 hour ago, Yagami said:

This is the 1st gym.If he wanted that much broken power,he would have just chosen speed boost torchic.

So I guess that would be a no on Arceus-Fighting?

[Yagami]

29 minutes ago, T.O.W.A.N. said:

So I guess that would be a no on Arceus-Fighting?

Can I take that one ?

[Nordling]

9 hours ago, T.O.W.A.N. said:

Yo, if you're interested, I can offer you a hawlucha, a heracross with rock blast, a technician breloom with bullet seed, a chimchar/monferno/infernape, a timburr, and a gallade. 

I may be interested in Timburr since wild/event fighters available before Shelly amount to a whopping number of 3, and rock type coverage would be very useful. Any overpowered mons suchs hawlucha or gallade would be game-breaking. I am worried however that it would ruin the genuine feeling of pokemon reborn playthrough.

 

19 hours ago, Anti_Hero said:

How about one of the 3 starter fighting types? There is the defensive grass fighting type and the son Goku of Pokémon you can still choose

 

I would choose Chimchar (you can either do a physical or special oriented one) it is a good Pokémon with good coverage and relatively fast 

I rejected all fighting starters on purpose. Riolu acts as a starter pokemon for this run - picking "another" starter would be contrary to the idea of the playthrough.

 

I'm gonna try to beat Julia once again. I was thinking about utilising the strat proposed by Yagami (also, I will try post larger screenshots):

On 28.10.2017 at 2:45 PM, Yagami said:

How about using focus energy+any move with your Boxer.That might help against Emolga.

If you think it's too hard then you should get a fourth member.
Also can you make the screenshot larger? Since you have put them in spoiler it shouldn't be any problem.

 

However, I will try something else and try to capitalise on the power of acrobatics by using counter on Emolga 

Spoiler

 

We'll see about that

 

Strat with counter was successful  Now let's OHKO all them voltorbs and zebstrika with the force palm.

 

After 2 aftermaths Van Damme went down. However, he did awesome job and narrowed the gym fight to 2-on-2.

 

Oh well, 2-on-1 since Zebstrika went down to one Boxer's karate chop. But before that, we set up a focus energy while curing T-wave's induced paralysis with cheri berry. Let's fish for some crits now!

 

OH YEAH! 2 crits and the battle was won. Junior was not even needed!

 

I would very much like to hear what you think about this. Should I go for Timburr as my next pick or just stick to the mons available in-game?

Edited October 29, 2017 by Nordling

[J-Awesome_One]

3 hours ago, Nordling said:

I may be interested in Timburr since wild/event fighters available before Shelly amount to a whopping number of 3, and rock type coverage would be very useful. Any overpowered mons suchs hawlucha or gallade would be game-breaking. I am worried however that it would ruin the genuine feeling of pokemon reborn playthrough.

 

I rejected all fighting starters on purpose. Riolu acts as a starter pokemon for this run - picking "another" starter would be contrary to the idea of the playthrough.

 

I'm gonna try to beat Julia once again. I was thinking about utilising the strat proposed by Yagami (also, I will try post larger screenshots):

 

However, I will try something else and try to capitalise on the power of acrobatics by using counter on Emolga 

  Hide contents

 

We'll see about that

 

Strat with counter was successful  Now let's OHKO all them voltorbs and zebstrika with the force palm.

 

After 2 aftermaths Van Damme went down. However, he did awesome job and narrowed the gym fight to 2-on-2.

 

Oh well, 2-on-1 since Zebstrika went down to one Boxer's karate chop. But before that, we set up a focus energy while curing T-wave's induced paralysis with cheri berry. Let's fish for some crits now!

 

OH YEAH! 2 crits and the battle was won. Junior was not even needed!

 

I would very much like to hear what you think about this. Should I go for Timburr as my next pick or just stick to the mons available in-game?

Wait. Isn't Pancham and Makuhita available in like the next area?

[Nordling]

@Awesome_Onethey are. Along mankey they sum up to 3 wild mons available. Next one available is corey's croagunk after shelly. And pancham is rly nothing special :/ timburr's rock throw would help me rly well so thats why im asking

[J-Awesome_One]

Ahh. I see. Well I was just trying to help out. Haha.

[Anti_Hero]

Makuita is a must, he saved me in so many fights

[Nordling]

After beating Julia we were asked to assist Florina in cleaning out the area of Obsidia as there is some weird vine infestation all over the place. It seems that the main all of the infestation comes from the local park. I wanted to investigate this lead further, however the street was torn apart and there was no clear way of passage. After talking with some locals they pointed me to Slums as the only way of getting through to the other side. However, Victoria was reluctant to go through there and wanted to test my strength whether I’ll be able to do so.

Spoiler

Well, Victoria, my prowess in training fighting types is far superior to yours... git gud

 

After some soul-searching I managed to catch 2 more mons for my team. Let me introduce you to the new team members, Ajax and Sumo (I think that I'm gonna always try to catch/soft rest mons to the point where they have doable natures + IVs panchams were rly mean and every caught one had shitty EVs >.<

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

Without further ado, let's proceed to the Slums.

Spoiler

Ok, boxes running around? What the hell is up with this town? To much of my relief, it just turned out to be a scraggy running free! Ohhh, come to momma Jackie

 

Oops, thought that I cornered scraggy and expand my team. How surprised I was to see not 1 but 3 of ‘em, and with their angry mom! Without warning they attacked me, apparently angry because of me chasing them throughout the slums. They are of dark type so it was an easy win. Sadly, they ran off and I didn’t have a chance to catch any of those scraggies

 

During the battle Van Damme levelled up to lv. 23 and to my great surprise evolved already! This is gon’ be good

 

 

During exploration of Coralward we encountered a certain individual named Amaria, who was worried about Oshawott sitting on a patch of land across azruine Lake (how did it get in the first place???). Fortunately, Cain came to the rescue and after some inappropriate jokes challenged us to a battle alongside its new partner Osha.

 

Spoiler

 

Even though I was in disadvantage, we managed to come out as the winners. We pushed further into the Obsidia ward only to fight out that the whole damage done was due to evil plotting of Team Meteor! There, we found out that behind all of this was some weird dude who had some kind of mental illness, schizophrenia? He claimed all the damage was done by this modified Tangrowth behind him, which was connected to some kind of big machinery and looked HUGE.

 

Spoiler

Soooo, the whole idea is to screech his defense to zero and then finish Tangrowth with either sumo or Ajax.

 

Plan worked perfectly.

After resolving the crisis in Obsidia Park we headed towards Onyx Trainser School in order to challenge Florinia. During some side questing & battling we picked 2 new evos for the guys

 

Spoiler

This guy’s a freaking beast and got such a diverse movepool!

 

Not only did Junior evolve he finally learned some good STAB i.e. bubblebeam which doesn't make him any more viable vs. Florinia or Fern.

 

Here's how the current team looks like. I think that with Van Damme evolved and Sumo being now Hariyama we won't have many problems with Rini. What do you guys think? Any pro tips against her? Or maybe some nice tricks? Who to send out vs. Florinia's Cacnea as lead? Would love to hear your ideas

Spoiler

 

[Nordling]

Nobody wants to help me with the gym fight

Ok then, I'll handle it by myself. 

 

First up tho is Fern who is becoming increasingly annoying as we advance with our adventure...

Spoiler

 

 

Lucker burned Ajax with tri-attack (nature power). Time for a switch.

 

You can heal this Lombre all you want. Van Damme is just too OP for ya

 

Due to being leech seeded by Servine, Sumo was brought in, letting Van Damme rest a bit. After skillfully paralysing Servine, it is time to deal the finishing blow and face Fern's ace, Roselia.

 

Believe me or not, poisoning guts Hariyama is actually a bad strat

Aaaaaaand the battle was won.

 

After healing up we went to face Florinia, the grass-type gym leader. Apparently, she tries to capitalise on sand-based arena instead of forest, which comes first to my mind when thinking about grass-types. Oh well, let's see what she can do. I decided to go with Sumo first as he is bulky & hard-hitting and Ame (via the telecom) adviced me to just hit hard and don't let her set up. Let's see if she was right!

 

Spoiler

 

Sumo paralysed Maractus and defeated him without taking any damage. Florinia tried to save him with super potions but it didn't do any good.

 

Aaaaaand another paralysis. Breloom managed to land leech seed on Sumo, which will be very effective due to high HP of the mon. Thus, a change must be made.

 

Spore

 

Ajax went down, however managed to use leer twice. Sumo will have easy time now

 

Despite being overleveled due to defeating Breloom and Maractus, Sumo still managed to take down Ferroseed and paralyse Cacnea. Hopefully, it will be now a walk in park.

 

Boxer did his job - he fnished Cacnea and screeched Cottonee. Now to finish with Junior's body slam.

 

cottonee missed with poisonpowder! Having Van Damme in reserve, I'm now sure to win this one.

 

This is some kind of paralysis festival  Way to go with that body slam Junior!

 

Battle was essentialy over.

 

Way to go team! Overall, we were extremely lucky to land paralyses just when they were needed. Sumo was the obvious MVP with handling all of those Florinia's top-threats such as Maractus and Breloom, OHKOing Ferroseed, as well as paving way for Boxer to revenge kill that Cacnea. 

 

Next up will be our journey to the north of Peridot Ward - into Jasper and Beryl Wards. 

However, I fear that it won't happen sooner than saturday/sunday in the next week :/

Edited October 30, 2017 by Nordling

[Nordling]

As stated above, there probably won't be any update until weekend. However I was thinking today about final team and came up with a rough sketch of how I want it to look like. Here are my must picks and their roles:

 

Lucario - physical setup sweeper

Toxicroak - mixed attacker with sludge wave especially for one certain person...

Scrafty - support stall with leftovers, intimidate, scary face, drain punch (or maybe HJK, we'll see)  and knock off.

 

What other mons should have a spot on the team? What roles should they have or particular movesets?

I would love to hear your thoughts on that topic

 

Edited October 31, 2017 by Nordling