Can You Beat Pokemon Crystal With Only a Ditto?

[Music] hello Internet users and welcome back to another insanity filled adventure after what happened last time in canto I think this topic needs little introduction we're going to jump into pokemon crystal version and see if we can go from start to finish using only a single ditto to overcome every battle before that though here's a brief rundown of what I'll be doing and any extra info you need to know I will not be using any items in the middle of battle and any necessary hm users will be left fainted in the party so that the opponents cannot force a switch and reset dittos transform as well in order for me to be able to do this challenge I've edited the selected starter Pokemon to be a level 5 ditto instead of a totodile going into generation - ditto more or less still functions exactly the same as the previous games using transform will copy all of the target stats and known moves with the only exception being hit points as well the PP for all known moves is set to 5 once transformed so when using transform it will have to rely on the strength of the enemy in front of it to succeed the move transform has of course received some tweaks in the sequel though most of which are related to fixing some glitches that the move could cause and after what happened in the last video I can say that I'm very relieved to hear that other than that the only notable change is that you can't transform into a target that is in the air from using fly or is underground from using dig and with all that end of the way let's begin belong a way to challenge the start of the game is pretty straightforward it's mainly just low-level Pokemon tackling each other until one of them faints having a ditto for this part makes very little difference however while running professor Elms errand I make sure to pick up some berries along the way you guys know how I hate spamming things like full restores to win battles but now that held items have been added in Gen 2 I'm going to be making use of the small benefits that they can give me now I arrived at the first real battle of the game there isn't anything to work with other than tackle and growl so I make sure to give ditto a berry beforehand to pretty much guarantee victory when dittos health is low it will restore 10 HP it doesn't matter if you win or lose this fight but I still wanted the exp for doing so anyway after returning to new bark town I can officially head out and begin my quest to collect all the badges by the way you may have noticed that it's now daytime contrary to popular belief I don't just have twelve hours set aside every day to do stuff like this it can sometimes only do a little bit at a time when I can so you can probably expect to see the footage jump around between day and night throughout the course of this video returning to route 30 I need to get past all the trainer's here to get to violet city before attempting to get the first badge I think it would be best to level up at sprout our first however all of the trainer's there have nothing but bail sprouts that just know vine whip and as I'm sure you can imagine that would make for some annoying and slow battles when using transform so I decided to go back to route 30 waste all of transforms pipian wild pokemon and hit them with struggle instead I did something similar in the last video but this time around struggle has also undergone a few changes for this generation in Gen 1 the recoil damage was equal to half of the damage that was inflicted to the opponent but now in Gen 2 it is only a fourth as well it is no longer affected by typing so even though it is a normal move it can hit ghost Pokemon however ditto will not be given the same type attack bonus when using it when the time comes to take on Faulkner I go in with the same strategy for a few reasons his first Pokemon is a Pidgey that knows tackle and mud-slap with his PG stats it'd be pretty annoying to take down his team with only 5 tackles and because the other move is ground-type it would not affect his Pokemon and he would get 5 free turns to attack me before I could strike back again with struggle I also gave dinner a berry just in case if this battle is certainly doable by transforming into his PG but because of mud-slap being one of its moves you really need to grind to have the HP to last her the fight as you can probably tell when it comes to Gen 2 in particular using the struggle strategy is a lot more viable in this game on top of being a generation where the recoil damage is small Johto is known to start with a very low leveled opponents in comparison to other generations and when you consider that opponents often start with their weakest Pokemon transform hardly gets a chance to shine at this point now that the Battle of Falkner is over with I proceed south to continue the journey along the way this guy here gives me a miracle seed a hold item that ups the power of grass moves throughout this playthrough I'm going to try and collect as many these kinds of hold items that I can as I'm sure you can imagine if I know what kind of moves my transform target is going to have in a battle it might be useful to give my ditto one of these beforehand it should be noted though that in the older games items like the miracle seed only give a 10% boost in power unlike the later games which give a 20% boost and on the subject of held items there is one more oddity I want to address because I know people will bring it up if I don't throughout the game there are items that grant certain effects to specific Pokemon take for example the light bulb an item that doubles a Pikachu's attack power if I were to go into a battle with my ditto holding a light ball and then transformed into a Pikachu the game would still recognize my Pokemon species as a ditto it would not grant it the power boost the same applies for other items such as the thick club for marowak and cubone and the stick for far-fetched anyways route 32 and union cabe aren't anything special they're filled with a whole lot of trainer fights but none of them pose any threat and even if they did you can walk around most of them anyway but even so I took the time to defeat them all anyway since I want to keep dedos level as high as I can when arriving in azalea town before I can attempt to get the second badge I need to get rid of the team rocket grunts inside the slowpoke well the final grunt just has a single coughing with to poison moves and tackle assuming you don't get any bad damage rules he isn't hard to take care of with five tackles with that out of the way the battle against Bugsy is next out of all the battles in the game Bugsy is an example of where you absolutely do not want to use transform as first Pokemon is a metapod with three moves there is no way to bring it down with your limited amount of tackles so you have to spend ten turns using the other moves before you can use struggle you might think that the use of harden five times is at least one benefit but it's actually not his second pokemon kikuna can only use harden in poison sting even with the use of the poison cure berry my HP is sure to be whittled down enough for a cipher to finish me off once it comes out so once again struggling with ditto is the way to go right after I'm done with the gym I have to defeat my rival for the second time in this fight he leads with a gastly that likes to put you to sleep and you spite to drain your peepee so whether I'm transformed or not I have to rely on struggle anyway so I left it OB itself for this one too however as I get further in the game the Pokemon are getting bulkier and the team sizes are starting to get bigger if I didn't get lucky with avoiding his Zubat supersonic and prepare to deal with his Bay Leafs poison powder this battle could have gone either way even though I'm clearly over leveled and now before I make my way to Goldenrod City I need to do something else first you see at this time I realized I was playing the game on a Monday and there is a helpful item that is obtained from a character that only appears on a Tuesday so to make things easier for myself I went all the way back to route 29 and saved so I could turn the game on tomorrow and pick it up the item I'm talking about is the pink bow which increases the power of the holders normal type attacks by 10% something that will no doubt come in handy for the third gym which specializes in that very type this is also good due to the fact that many Pokemon usually have a normal type move such as tackle and scratch or pound on them anyway in hindsight I probably should have just started the game on a Tuesday so I could have gotten the bow as soon as possible but now that that's all taken care of it's time to head to Goldenrod City the first thing I do here is head to the underground to pick up a coin case next I purchase a few coins in order to exchange for an Abra why do I want an Abra well at the top of the goldenrod department store there was a man who was looking for one and is willing to trade him a chop for it the reason I do this in-game trade is because of the item the Machop is holding a gold berry the gold berry is a held item that restores 30 HP when a pokémon's health is low I'm saving this item for a little later aside from this Machop the only other way to get a gold berry this early in the game is to win it as a prize at the bug catching contest but since the contest is only held twice a week and the berry is the prize for third place this is obviously a much more unreliable way to obtain one as well I'm going to eventually need an HM user for strength anyway so two birds one stone going to Whitney's gym I find what is one of the more unique fights for the ditto challenge for first Pokemon is Clefairy which knows encore mimic double slap and metronome thanks to the pink bow and cliff Ares typing I have no trouble taking it down for her infamous miltank I know that it's not gonna go down easy so I leave it all up to metronome for my first metronome I got glare which paralysed miltank next was rolling kick a fighting-type move after that I somehow got karate chop which also landed a critical hit on the fourth metronome I got quick attack which was slightly boosted by the pink bone and after all that unbelievable luck instead of doing the safer option of finishing it off with double slap I for some reason put everything into my final metronome which came out to be roll out in that moment I thought I was about to knock out Whitney's miltank using the very move that has caused a lot of people grief except it didn't kill and I got finished off instead I made a few more attempts no matter what miltank always goes for roll out so I have to hope that metronome gives me something that can disrupt the move before it gains power luckily on my final attempt I managed to get minimize and also confused miltank with swagger so I'm sure many of you get the point by now even with a ditto all of the NPC trainers especially in Johto are kind of a joke though we're pretty much just gonna be glossing over them and skipping to the more important parts of this run i highly doubt any of you came here to see me say and then i use tackle on this guy's ran attack for 30 minutes the next place I'm going to head is equity city where I have to complete both the third rival encounter and the fourth gym leader Morty however for now I'm going to ignore the two of them and first go as far as I possibly can defeating all the trainers that are available at this point of the game Morty's badge is the one that allows you to use surf so I can only put him off for so long and in order to enter his gym my rival must first be to feed it at the burn tower these two are pretty tricky opponents and I really need to take a moment to explain why Morty's team consists of four members gastly two haunters and a gengar among these pokemon the ghastly and one of the hunters knows the move curse and on my rivals team he starts off with a Haunter that also knows it when this move is used against an opponent it will cause them to lose a quarter of their maximum HP every however it will not activate on a turn where an opponent is knocked out this is likely to prevent the player from running out of Pokemon at the same time as the other trainer as that situation always counts as a loss for the player in both of these battles during my first turn of transforming I'd no doubt be cursed and have to suffer the damage for the rest of the battle which makes things near impossible and by now the game expects a normal player to be using a handful of different Pokemon curse is very much a problem if you're dumb enough to do some kind of self-imposed single Pokemon challenge I should also mention Morty's last Pokemon is a gengar that knows Shadow Ball so even if I managed to make it that far into the battle of transform that'll no doubt finish me like I said I trained as much as I could beforehand in order to keep dittos HP as high as possible to try and last through both the curse and recoil damage if ditto has problems struggling when it's over leveled then I'll just have to make it even more over level I found that fighting wild Stantler was a pretty efficient method to keep getting the exp though for some reason they only show up in Crystal version at night by this point my rival isn't too much to worry about and the blob of goo hits them like a storm although it still annoys me that is bayleaf still doesn't go down in one hit this goes to show how little did those stats actually increase with every level up because Mori specializes in the ghost type I want to go in with a struggling normal type ditto as it will be completely immune to the majority of his team's offensive options I also intentionally picked up and save the gold berry specifically for this battle and I'm sure by now you're wondering why my ditto is paralyzed this is to prevent his Gengar from putting me to sleep with hypnosis and then using Dream Eater which is the only other thing it can do since Shadow Ball does not affect a normal type like ditto but this set up morty strongest Pokemon has become his weakest and I can easily overpower the rest of his team I was even lucky with the amount of times I lost a turn due to paralysis so I didn't end up consuming my gold berry too but the fourth badge claimed I can head right to the next one the Pokemon in Chuck's gym are fighting type however all I need here is the pink bow again his first Pokemon primeape knows rage and once I use it I just get him to hit me with fury swipes in my max tat gets boosted by quite a bit however as Poliwrath can still make things annoying this thing always manages to land a hypnosis and dynamic punch on me it's just a matter of getting through his stall tactics next is Jasmine initially I went into this one trying to use transform which at first seemed pretty doable sure her Magnemite Selectric moves may not work on her strongest Pokemon but Magnemite is fragile enough that I can use it against them despite it not being very effective but her steel ex is still a real problem at first I was extremely worried that it would no earthquake but it turns out it doesn't even have a ground type move no the strongest option it has against me is iron tail which Magnemite can resist by quite a bit the strategy I was going for here was to confuse it with supersonic while hitting it with sonic boom this idea was working however she has a hyper potion saved just for steelix I don't have enough PP they bring its health down for a second time and I'm quickly forced to sit there wasting my electric moves while it finishes ditto off so next I tried going in with struggle like I said her Magnemite are weak so they both go down in one hit however even at this level ditto just barely puts a dent in Steel X's health bar I was able to win but only because I had saved that gold berry from earlier otherwise I would have had really going grind again before I can enter the next gym I first need to go through Team Rocket's hideout there isn't anything special in terms of difficulty about this part I think we can all agree that no matter what Pokemon you're using rocket runs aren't a challenge they're just a handful of tedious battles you have to get through one notable thing here though is this scientist right here you see his only Pokemon is also a ditto because my ditto is at a much higher level it always goes first I wasn't it to transform into his ditto but then when his ditto tries to transform into mine it fails because you cannot transform into a transform Pokemon even when it's transformed into the same Pokemon that it was before it transformed so what ends up happening is that my ditto transforms every turn causing transforms PP to always be reset to 5 and because the transform of his ditto is failing he slowly loses his PP until he is forced to struggle me to death so for this battle I'm pretty much forced to sit there until I'm defeated by my own stupid strategy luckily this character is completely unnecessary to battle and you can just walk around them and even if I couldn't I could just go and beat him with struggle from the get-go anyway the next gym leader is price he's also a pretty annoying fight his first Pokemon is seal and the second one dugong knows the exact same moves as I'm sure you can guess these two like to spam rest as much as possible this forces me to sit around wasting all of my moves until I can struggle and nothing I have does much damage to them and even then I have to hope for a critical hit for it to be possible to take down Dewgong I do manage to get to his pulao swine but unsurprisingly Lu's also unsurprisingly I go back and just get ditto to struggle through the whole battle by this point it's apparent that this is often the best strategy which is actually also kind of disappointing for this run I was hoping to be able to use dittos unique gimmick a lot more but the further I go the more I'm realizing just how much Jen to really babies the player compared the Jen one the majority of enemy Pokemon in this game have a really underwhelming assortment of moves most of the time when I use transform it's preferable to waste most of my moves as struggle as a better offensive option than anything else the opponent has available and yeah obviously I'm playing the game in a very stupid and unintended way but I was hoping that by you know the seventh gym the other trainers would be able to use more than just headbutt in weak elemental attacks remember Jasmine steelix that thing even knows sunny day a move that does nothing for her team but boosts the power of the moves they're weak against because apparently the devs thought starting with cyndaquil wasn't already easy enough while working on this video I found out that a lot of Pokemon in this game have much more variety with their known moves in the heart gold and soul silver remakes there have honestly been quite a few moments where I wish I was playing one of those games instead just for that reason alone anyway the rants over and the next battle is against silver for this one I use a paralyzed cure berry to stop his Magnemite from hitting me with thunder wave his Haunter is faster than his goal bass so it's always going to hit me with after a few attempts I managed to just scrape by with transform making sure to conserve some wing attacks for his Meganium at the end and now after taking care of the rest of the rocket grunts and saving the radio tower it's time to go beat up Claire's Pokemon her team has three dragon air all of which will do whatever they can to paralyze you luckily by going in with the paralyzed cure berry I can help prevent this and once I'm transformed each of them go down with this single dragon breath once their Kingdra comes out I have more than enough at my disposal to deal with it with eight badges collected it's finally time to head to the Pokemon League but before that at the end of Victory Road my rival shows up for one more battle his lead Pokemon is Sneasel which is more or less a throwaway team member for him so I don't even bother trying to win with it the only real problems that his team can give is that his goal that uses confuse ray and his Magneton has Thunder Wave using a berry to hold off either of these status conditions is all I need but yet again despite being absurdly over leveled I can apparently only just scrape by with this tactic one of the biggest challenges of the game is just up ahead but before I even consider attempting it I decide that now is a good time to grind it o up to the max level and also go back and gather any other held items that I might find useful the first member of the Elite Four is will the psychic-type trainer this is another frustrating one both of his Zhou to know confuse ray and believe me they will go for it if they can because I have to spend a turn transforming I'm guaranteed to have to start the battle while confused meaning that it's hard to even retaliate with the same attack sure I could use a bitter berry to stop it the first time but there's a little point it would only care Dino once and then the berry is consumed upon use I just be wasting all the ones I have in my attempts to beat him remember when I said that the remakes gave opponents a better a variety of boobs well the Elite Four are probably one of the biggest examples of this change and Gen 2 both of wills a two are identical knowing quick attack Future Sight confuse ray and psychic in the gen 4 games they're both different with his first saw to knowing you turn me first confuse ray and psychic as it stands trying to win while transformed is all up to luck it's just turn after turn of hoping you don't take confusion damage and that his Pokemon do as jinx is also especially dangerous as it will always either hit you hard with ice punch or put you to sleep first it's doable but you're at the mercy of the game's orangy the whole time so when surprisingly I go for struggle instead because he's only the first member I don't bother wasting my bitter berries right away all of his Pokemon no psychic the strongest move for the type at the time so it's no surprise that the damage against me builds up easily but assuming that I can avoid dealing with confusion for enough turns I can once again get by his whole party with struggle sadly though it looks like the same strategy has to be done for the rest of the Elite Four as well why you ask well because for all three of them their first Pokemon happened to be so awful it's not even funny Koga has an aria dose that knows spiderweb baton pass Giga Drain and double team sure this pokemons typing may make it immune to being poisoned but once again it's all up to luck you would pretty much just have to hope that those five double teams make you dodge attacks long enough to struggle his team to death and getting the opportunity that do that is also pretty hard as you'll have to waste all of the PP of Aria doses terrible moves first and at that point you might as well just simplify things by letting ditto do the struggling itself for this one I give Dino a poison cure berry most of his Pokemon will try and poison me with toxic so it's crucial that that doesn't happen early on another problem is his fortress which knows explosion if that hits me it's doubtful that I'll have enough HP to struggle through the rest of the battle although it's not a sure thing I can still take him down this way maybe even a little bit easier than will Bruno just makes me sad his first pokémon is a hitmontop who for some reason doesn't know an offensive fighting-type move in this generation why I give it the soft sand so that its strongest move dig can hopefully be useful using hitmontop instead of ditto isn't actually the worst thing in the world however as I learned with the next battle going through this one with struggle is pretty mandatory you'll see why in a second Karon is the last member of the elite for and her first Pokemon might just be the worst one of all her Umbreon nose faint attack confuse ray mean look and sand attack yet again you can't make it through this battle of transform without the odds happening the swing in your favor I don't even try her vileplume will always try to paralyze you with stun Spore and her Gengar newest both curse and destiny bond as if that wasn't enough the only thing Umbreon could really do is confuse the opponents and lower their accuracy both of which can hardly be called consistent strategies especially when you're likely to run out of faint attacks before her first pokemon even goes down again I know I have no one to blame but myself for the ridiculous rules I'm playing by but it's still kind of ashamed to see how underwhelming the elite four are compared to the last video obviously since struggle is the way to go and transforms PP can only be restored between battles by five or ten at a time I have no choice but to defeat all of the previous members this way in order to be able to use struggle against Karin but now the question remains how will I approach the battle against Lance Lance is someone that I thought I could use transform against as Gyarados has access to really good moves and with the help of the pink bow his hyper beam would be insanely good however this is completely crippled by one very unfortunate thing you see his Gyarados will always use rain dance well that may be something that is usually good for a water-type the issue is that one of his Dragonite knows thunder and he will always and I mean always send that one out as his second pokemon in this battle all it takes is one hit from that and my transformed in OH was knocked out if there was one fight I was hoping I can avoid using struggle it's this one Lance has a full party of strong Pokemon including three bulky Dragonite in order for me to possibly make it through this battle I have no choice but to hope everything goes my way I need some of his hyper beams to miss me and I need to land critical hits at crucial moments I spent many many attempts on this battle hoping to get the results I wanted a few times I came close taking his final Dragonite down to just a shred of hell discouraging but that only made it clear to me that this was indeed possible to do later on I got even closer knocking out both of us at the same time but that still counts as a loss for me but after so much more attempts I finally managed to do it roofing that ditto can indeed conquer the johto region with all of the suffering over I can now relax and do something else with my time or at least I wish I could I think we all know that there is someone else I have to try to defeat before I can say this is over but before I can get there I need to take care of another eight battles first the moment I arrived in Kanto the first thing I do is head to sell it on city if you thought struggle was overpowered before it's about to get even better now that I have the leftovers the Kanto gyms are pretty underwhelming in this game even if I didn't now have the leftovers to restore some HP every turn most of them are ridiculously easy to plow through with struggle for those unaware the Kanto gyms are known for being pretty under leveled in this game I guess Game Freak must have realized how easy they were too because they were all made to be a bit stronger in the remakes there isn't really much to say about what I'm doing at this point since seven of them only have three or four Pokemon they're barely a step above most of the regular NPC trainers you see throughout the game most of them don't even take me below half health by the end the one exception though is the final gym leader blue he has a full party of six Pokemon stronger than Lance with his levels being in the mid 50s with that in mind I'm doubtful that ditto can struggle through this one so I try to use transform however that would turn out to yet again be a bad idea major problem on his team is his ride on who can one shot me with rockslide his Pidgeot also doesn't have the moves to properly deal with this but that's not even the worst of it as I'm sure some of you remember I've used glues Pidgeot against him before but this time something weird is going on for some reason mirror move will not work for me I'm not exaggerating either and the insane amount of time I spent attempting this fight it failed 100% of the time there is just no way that's a coincidence I'm convinced that ditto using it while transformed is causing some kind of glitch to happen so I guess the glitches of transform haven't been come we fixed after all last time the game took away my ability to struggle this time it's crippling my ability to transform so with Pidgeot already given me a clear disadvantage I also have to deal with the fact that one of my moves is now a dead slot once again I have no choice but to try struggle with ditto hoping that all the stars align and my dumb luck prevails let me tell you this battle took even longer than Lance and it requires more specific things to occur one of the things I quickly realized is that a critical hit on his Alakazam is mandatory if that thing doesn't go down in one move it'll either hit hard with psychic or use reflect both of which are things that I can not afford to have happen so early on in the battle this is also necessary for his last Pokemon arcanine - otherwise he'll just heal it with a full restore so after an eternity I finally did it I nearly had a heart attack watching the final amount of recoil damage happened - now you all know what's next I'm headed to mount Silver to take on red this is the final battle in the game and there is a huge jump in levels for his party struggling is almost out of the question as all of their stats far exceed that of a level 100 ditto I go in with leftovers again hoping to make little Pikachu survive and do the whole thing by itself earlier in this video I mentioned the light ball and why it wouldn't work if I gave it to ditto for the battle I should also mention that a common misconception is that people think that Reds Pikachu is holding a light ball in this game this is only true when the DS remakes so this Pikachu here isn't nearly as dangerous and this is how the challenge ends having to battle some of the most powerful Pokemon in the game at the highest levels in the game while stuck using the power of one of the most fragile it's like a cruel joke after all I've gone through I'm sure you might be thinking though well at least Charizard and Blastoise will go down easy right wrong I'm not sure if it's because he's taking Pikachu's type into account but he will always send out those two Pokemon last and by then there is zero chance you'll have any PP left for your moves not that it matters as even when I get as far as his Venusaur a single solar beam will destroy me a lot of the major battles throughout this game have required me simply hoping for the right things to happen at the right time but red takes it to the absolute extreme to give a demonstration of how insanely impossible this is I'm going to cheat for a moment to show you a near-perfect battle in order for me to take down his Venusaur from the beginning of the battle every electric move I use has to hit paralyze and land as a critical and afterwards all of his Pokemon must always lose their turn to paralysis I don't think I need to tell you that such a thing occurring is near on impossible and cannot be realistically expected but hypothetically if I were to ever end up in such a position and red is down to his last two pokemon I still couldn't win the battle even with every move I use dealing the maximum amount of damage there is no way to still have any electric type attacks left for Charizard and Blastoise struggle barely puts a dent into Charizard critical or not and he can just obliterate me from full health with a single flamethrower which also doesn't even have to be a critical hit struggling with ditto just won't work his Pokemon are just too powerful and in this case I don't even have a way to paralyze him either so I'd be taking even more damage throughout the battle than if I transformed even with getting the most optimal results every turn to conclude the only way I can possibly win is by spamming full restores the whole time not exactly what I'd call an impressive method but it's also the only one so I suppose by my own rules I can't do it in this video I set out to see if pokemon crystal could be beaten by using just a ditto did I accomplish that I mean beating Lance also rules the credits doesn't it so could you say that I already proved it at that point is all of Kanto the real end of the game or should it be considered a bonus I'm not really sure but I don't think it matters anymore I've played through enough of the game and I think I'll leave that stuff up to you guys my name is Mukesh spray and thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Pikasprey Yellow

Views: 2,388,902

Rating: 4.9151478 out of 5

Keywords: Gaming, Video Games

Id: jEtJxO4nvv8

Length: 30min 46sec (1846 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 30 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Ddgraves]

Oh yeah I love this guy I burned through his entire 20-part playthrough of Crystal using a team of 6 Smeargles pretty quick. That was...aggravating to watch sometimes but this dude knows what hes doing

[u/Vinnyboiler]

Good job struggle is a thing...

[u/vyts18]

I feel like a lot of his problems in this would have been fixed if he carried some Elixirs and/or Ethers and used more potions/full restores.

[u/OrobaSpyro]

oh dear