Game Theory: What Level is Ash's Pikachu? (Pokemon)

it's been three years since i undertook the mammoth task of calculating ash's age two videos that drove me insane with days of research cross-referencing watching the show but it was definitely worth it what do you mean that was nothing i ripped my hair out researching that episode wait is that it i barely felt a tingle you've traveled to eight different regions at this point surely you have to be stronger than th oh that's what the episode's about isn't it [Music] hello internet welcome to game theory i guess yeah it's another one of those what channel should this be on episodes anyway back in 2018 i did a theory that nearly broke me i wanted to figure out how old ash ketchum from the pokemon anime really was and if you watched that theory you'd know that it took a toll on me days and weeks of solid research and writing with details hidden in the craziest of places but alas dear theorists that was just the warm-up today we are gonna be looking at the other biggest question people have about the pokemon anime what level is ash's pikachu you see what started me down this path was the first episode of season 14 the start of the pokemon black and white or best wishes arc in this episode ash challenges a trainer who's just received his first pokemon from professor juniper a snivy in this battle pikachu lands one hit on his opponent and receives two hits in return but after the second hit pikachu faints he just loses the battle how at this point ash and pikachu have traveled to five different regions earned themselves a total of 52 badges and one against the toughest trainers even literal gods so that was it friends my theory brain went to work to figure out what level pikachu would have to have been by the time he fought snivy in that episode to prove definitively that there was literally no way that he could possibly lose and to do it i had to sit down and watch the preceding 651 episodes of the anime and 13 movies which yes are considered canon i double checked i had to watch every single one because guess what all the battles that pikachu appears in and makes a pokemon faint in are not clearly marked off on any fan wiki in existence oh boy this was a rough one but i can tell you that my work was worth it because what i found at the end of my anime binge was shocking to say the least pikachu was nowhere near the level that i or anyone else in the fandom currently thinks he should be at so what level is pikachu our epic pokemon journey starts now so obviously the answer we reach today is going to be our best approximation of his level the anime timeline and geography don't really line up with the games perfectly and we all know that they don't totally follow the same rules as the games won't work horn acts just like a lightning rod as such i needed to set some ground rules we're only going to be counting battles that we see on screen pikachu has had to have fought in the battle and the opponent has had to have fainted usually shown by big spirals across their eyes or they have to have been deemed unable to battle by a referee we also won't be counting every time team rocket blasts off again there are however occasions where team rockets pokemon are shown to clearly faint prior to their blast off and so those will be counted we also won't be considering moves used as a sign of pikachu leveling up this is because the names of moves are sometimes used interchangeably especially in the early seasons of english dub they also have a habit of giving pokemon moves that they can't physically learn like charmander using skull bash move that the charmander family can never learn or pikachu learning the move volt tackle a move that can only be obtained through breeding and not learned naturally now for this theory we're going to be using the flat rate exp equation from the games hence why this is a game theory where the amount of exp you earn is based off of the following factors if the opponent is wild or owned by a trainer if the winning pokemon is with its original trainer the base experience yield of that specific pokemon if the pokemon is holding a lucky egg the level of the fainted pokemon if an exp point power is active if the pokemon has an affection rating of two and above and if the winning pokemon is past the level it should evolve all of that then gets multiplied together and divided by seven multiplied by an amount based on if the exp shares on which leaves you with an equation that looks a little something like this section t e p v and s are all gonna be set to one as ash is pikachu's original owner and the other items are not seen to be used variable v was only implemented in gen six which we're not getting to today because we're stopping our calculation at that particular snivy fight pikachu's affection though is an interesting one it becomes 1.2 if the affection is above 2 which i believe happens around episode 30 onwards as pikachu there is shown to put aside his own feelings to help ash get what he wants so those are all the obvious and easy variables the big challenge is figuring out the level of each and every losing pokemon throughout every single one of the anime battles for the sake of the theory we use two ways to calculate this if the pokemon is wild i took the route that they were on or at least the route they should be on based on which cities they're traveling between and from there i looked at the highest level pokemon and lowest level pokemon that you can find on said route from there i simply took the median number or middle number for example on route 1 the highest level is seven but the lowest is two so the median level for that route is five for any trainer battles i instead use the mean level or average level for that route adding them all up and dividing by the number of trainers the exception to this was when gym leaders or team rocket used pokemon that their in-game counterparts also use which case i just used the level from that pokemon directly the final final factor is that we'll be calculating pikachu's level by taking his total experience and finding the cube root of that number this is because pikachu is part of the medium fast exp group and so this is how the game calculates it alright alright geez enough table setting let's actually start the quest shall we pikachu's adventure begins in the kanto region when professor oak gives him to ash as his first pokemon meaning that we start with pikachu at level 5 just like he does in pokemon yellow in that first episode pikachu actually gets his first win and it's an impressive one ash and pikachu get chased by a flock of spearow which forces pikachu to leap into the air and unleash an incredible thundershock now the spiro would have been about level 5 considering that they're on route 1. the most we see on screen at any given time is 46. so that right there gives us a nice healthy 1905 exp right off the bat immediately jumping pikachu to level 12 in the first episode alone things are looking good pikachu's victories after that first episode though become few and far between beating brock's geodude a wild squirtle in episode 12 lieutenant serge's raichu a wild grimer in episode 29 and a trainer's paris on episode 41. though in this episode we're going to assume that paris is level 5 due to the story pointing out that he's particularly weak what a pathetic paris at this point we come to one of our first tricky calculations pikachu defeats ash's charmeleon in that same episode episode 41 which on its own is fine but charmeleon only evolved the episode prior and will evolve again in just two episodes time not even appearing in the next episode this means that we have very little to go off of what his level would be so for the sake of simplicity i'm just gonna assume that he's now level 26 right in the middle of charmeleon's two evolutionary points after this pikachu wins against a wild doge rio in a hospital in episode 44 our first team rocket faint in episode one of season two then there's blaine's ride on and a return of jessie's arbok in episode six few more uneventful battles before pikachu has an incredible victory against three pokemon at the start of the first movie then have a fight with the trainer's marowak in season 2 episode 19 pete's arcanine in the third round of the pokemon league episode 22 and his final kanto victory richie's butterfree in the fourth round episode 25. so by the end of the kanto region pikachu has won 21 battles and by my calculations is now level 30 which makes his victories that much more impressive considering by the fourth round of the pokemon league your opponents are supposed to be in their high 50s so i guess ash is either smarter than we think or he's incredibly lucky either way his luck soon runs out he's defeated by richie and ash and pikachu head on over to the orange islands and this is where things go a little off the rails see the orange islands have never appeared in any pokemon game why why couldn't i have picked a simpler episode it's okay matpat remember what the therapist said breathe in breathe out it's okay i'm good i'm good let's get to it the closest thing i could find to the orange islands was the sevi islands introduced in fire red and leaf green which uh fun fact by the way i never thought about this when i was actually playing the games but it finally clicked as i was researching for this episode sevi v i i that's seven in roman numerals but it's also a pun c sev is short for seven and then the two eyes at the end represent the two other islands mine explosion anyway the sevi islands are located in a similar place on the wider world map and they're basically the adventure after your main adventure in the kanto region so i'm guessing they're gonna have to do pikachu doesn't have many battles in the orange islands but he does have himself a few wins he beats team rockets arbok wheezing and lickitung in season 2 episode 34 which would be similar levels to that of the rocket grunts that you find in the warehouse on island 5. there's a wild rydon and jesse's arbak a second time in season 2 episode 48 and a gym leaders marowak and alakazam in season 2 episode 52 which i based off the trainer tower on island 7. to finish it off ash challenges the champion of the orange league whose levels i was able to calculate from the fire red and leaf green league champion rival blue when you challenge him to a rematch after beating the sevi islands making them all about level 73 pikachu crushes it beating both his ditto and dragonite in season 2 episode 55 and 56 ash actually wins this battle entirely and enters the orange island hall of fame which strangely enough nobody ever seems to acknowledge the show talks all about how the orange league has trainers that are a lot tougher and even though ash wins no one ever seems to remember it even in blogs outside of the show he only got attention when he finally won the alola league like oh my gosh ash actually won something for a change he won back in season two guys i mean what does a guy gotta do to get some recognition around here your time will come ash your time will come but before that we got three more regions to plow through at the end of the orange islands pikachu has amassed 35 levels wait really is that it are you taking down pokemon that are twice as powerful at this point you might think that my pursuit's been wasted as by my own logic pikachu shouldn't have been able to win those fights but i'm not gonna let anime logic get in the way of my cold hard calculations that is empirically speaking what level he should be at based on all the fights he's done at this point in the series so we're carrying onward to the johto arc which brings around a shift in the way that the anime works the first two seasons had two regions and two leagues but in johto we actually have three seasons just to complete that one league meaning that there are way more battles per region along the way so you would think that this is where pikachu's level would start to climb faster but there are two problems first pikachu takes a bit of a back seat during the johto arc to let ash's shiny new pokemon take the spotlight secondly the start of a new canon region also means an interesting twist with regards to the game mechanics the pokemon levels within the region reset although at this point pikachu is at level 35 the pokemon in the early routes will be very low level pokemon as you'd expect when you start a new game the anime does make a point of this when ash first arrives showing that he's too overpowered hence pikachu taking a back seat and us saying goodbye to characters like charizard and squirtle early on now instead of me just rattling off a bunch of battles i'm gonna show you the list here you can trust me i watched them all some noteworthy things worth mentioning episode 41 ash runs into the other team rocket cassidy and biff the name is butch can't you get anything right sorry butch so for these guys i decided to take the grunts from the radio tower because it's the same city of goldenrod but also there's a striking resemblance between cassidy and the female rocket grunt next pikachu has a run-in with whitney's famous mill tank in season 4 episode 1 which he does defeat upon second try much like i did back in the day stupid miltank and your stupid rollout but the big headaching calculations came from our old friends the original team rocket in episode 33 of season 4 pikachu defeats jesse's arbok and in episode 24 of season 5 he defeats james's wheezing this is where the problems begin see these pokemon are from the very first region meaning that they must have grown since we last beat them on the orange islands at level 49 however because of the region reset we can't take our usual levels from the surrounding trainers as suddenly they'd be back to like level 20 which just isn't possible so i had to make an educated guess as to what level they'd be assuming they're growing at a similar rate to pikachu i'd put them down as arbok being level 55 and wheezing being level 60 at the time of their respective battles but if you don't agree with that methodology it doesn't matter in the long run which you'll see later as i mentioned pikachu was used a lot less in this region only 21 winning battles the same as kanto but spread out over three seasons this gives pikachu a current level of 40. only 5 levels more since we last left off in the org islands but at least now he's at a point where taking on pokemon league opponents is at least a little bit more believable and with that it's uh time for a break seriously this script is massive and we're only halfway through all the episodes that i gotta cover plus there's some really interesting problems that you and i have to talk about when it comes to the upcoming seasons like proving whether or not pikachu's level gets reset from the events in the series and weird calculation quirks like the battlefrontier trust me i wanted to make this one episode i tried to thin this down to fit into one episode but there's just so much that i have to cover to get to this answer it's actually a really hard topic and hey i watched 600 episodes and 13 movies to learn the answer to this one all you have to do is watch two of our episodes to get it so at least in my opinion fair trade tune in next time as we reach our final answer what is pikachu's true level in the meantime remember it's all just a theory a game theory thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 2,867,355

Rating: 4.9502683 out of 5

Keywords: pikachu level, pokemon snap, pikachu, pokemon brilliant diamond, pokemon shining pearl, pokemon snap gameplay, pokemon sword and shield, pokemon journeys, pokemon crown tundra, pokemon go, pokemon sword and shield crown tundra, pokemon sword and shield episode, pokemon sword, pokemon shield, pokemon episode, pokemon full episode, pokemon movie, pokemon song, game theorists, game theory, matpat, game theory pokemon, ash ketchum, ash pikachu level, ash's pikachu level

Id: NpdZPzMh7bA

Length: 13min 50sec (830 seconds)

Published: Sat May 22 2021