Nidoran Female Only - Yellow Version vs Blue Version - ft. VanMan

today i want to find out which game is harder for knit around female to beat pokemon yellow or pokemon blue over the last year i've become very familiar with pokemon yellow the thing is i haven't played pokemon blue in years so i'll need an expert on that game to help and who would be better than van man he's a poke tuber who also makes solo challenge content in pokemon red and blue and over the last year he's become a good friend plus i love watching his content myself so i thought it'd be really fun to collaborate with him so here's how the video is going to work we're both going to complete a first attempt solo playthrough with knitter and female and we picked it specifically because we both haven't used it before that way neither of us has an information advantage going into this playthrough primarily we're interested in comparing the games to see the differences between the two if any however we did approach this with the spirit of a friendly race friendly enough to give each other tips while we're playing yes we did stream these playthroughs on twitch so head over there and follow van man so that you catch the next one when it goes live by the way we also did a knit around mail race so right after this video is done check out that video on van man's channel if you're here live for the premiere on my channel it's actually going to premiere on van man's channel immediately after this video for the video format this is only going to feature a single playthrough from each of us because time is limited and in the future i want to do an optimized knit around playthrough video to compare both knit around female and knitter on male so don't worry we'll all get our fix of optimization eventually now let's talk rules for this race we decided to blend our rules together we can only use our starter in battle no items in battle no glitches or exploits with the exception of the badge boost glitch and the marowak skip no tm32 before level 100 no buying vitamins but you can use the ones that you pick up in the over world and finally i'll be allowed to use the bike as per my rules but van man will not use the bike because his rules don't allow it i'm very curious to compare walking and biking does the bike really go faster well we're gonna find out but that's getting ahead of myself first let's check knit around female's base stats it has 55 hp 47 attack 52 defense 40 special 41 speed and that gives it a 7.81 chance to crit by the way the overlay lies for pedantic math reasons ah pause the video and see why so it's basically a balanced pokemon with an emphasis on defense and hp its attack is right in the middle and it's speed and special like pretty far behind that's pretty unfortunate for it so let's get into the playthroughs i'm going to point out version differences between the two games as we go there's a few small differences in the earliest portions of the game first van man makes the choice actively to play blue version instead of red version i'll explain later why that's relevant when we both journey outside of pallet town i have to make one extra step into the grass before oak stops me obviously this one extra step is going to make me lose now the biggest difference of the early game is how the rival picks his starter and ace in yellow his final eeveelution is based on the outcome of the first two rival battles the one here in the lab and the one west of viridian city on route 22. if you win in both locations he picks jolteon if you win in the lab and skip route 22 then he picks flareon and if you lose in the lab then he picks vaporeon also in this first fight evie is sort of a beast it destroys nidoran in my first battle so now even if i fight him on route 22 he's still gonna pick vaporeon we were chatting while playing these runs and batman reminded me that i could reset here to get a different eeveelution but i don't think that that's the best choice while losing here does slow my early game down i didn't level up after all i believe that it might actually be an advantage to face vaporeon it's by far his weakest team and that's because he doesn't have cloister and vaporeon's moveset is the worst when compared to flareons and jolteons for van man the early game features an interesting choice he has to choose which starter to replace with nidoran in this case he replaces squirtle so the rival will pick bulbasaur he planned it this way because he felt that facing venusaur would be the easiest for nidoran to face in the late game but he runs into some trouble against bulbasaur in the first fight and bulbasaur's gonna beat me oh my gosh well maybe not yet i have two hp yeah he beat me oh geez looks like uh things are off to a great start i have bad memories of using first stage poison pokemon i really hope that nidoran isn't going to be that bad please let this not be a coughing or ekansteer playthrough okay i'll get back on track i'll stop complaining about poison pokemon while i was i missed a couple details fan man has less dialogue in the lab because professor oak doesn't remark on the fact that pikachu doesn't like pokeballs i'm mentioning all these tiny details now but honestly i'm not gonna be able to do this throughout the entire playthrough i'm gonna focus my attention on the details that matter most to solo playthroughs and one of those details is the fact that this catching tutorial guy is a failure in yellow yes he always fails van man on the other hand can just skip the tutorial entirely in this case the catching guy is just not needed so yeah he's having a really bad day these differences have been quite trivial until this point but in viridian forest major differences start appearing i sort of want to keep track of all these differences so i'm gonna use this counter to keep track of which game appears to be more difficult i'll add a point to whichever game has it harder in each situation this is just for fun it's not science every point will not be comparable so the differences in viridian forest are that in blue there's an antidote here instead of a potion which is helpful because weedles spawn but in yellow they don't this fact isn't particularly relevant today because nidoran's a poison type so it can't be poisoned anyways what really matters here is the encounter rate and the spawn levels blue version has an eight percent encounter rate in the forest and not all the tiles generating counters also the pokemon that do appear are on average at lower levels than their yellow counterparts additionally yellow has two new trainers that don't appear in red and blue at all the last at the start of the forest and the bug catcher with two pokemon in the middle of the forest blue is definitely harder for nidoran because van man is going to have less access to trainer experience and the wild experience yields will level him up slower and if you know these games even a little bit you'll know that that's really important because the hardest brick rock solid wall that is brock is coming up right away so what moves does nidoran have access to well most pokemon maintained the same move pools when yellow was released but a select few got changed and nidoran female is one of these pokemon the only change they did between the games is that in blue it learns double kick at level 43 and in yellow this was changed to level 12. obviously gamefreak realized that they needed to give players options against brock when the starter is pikachu so the early game looks like it's going to give van man a really slow start that's a second difficulty point for blue version for me my nidoran is going to learn double kick early on so i'm only going to train in viridian forest enough so that i level up to level 12 when i defeat the light years junior trainer in brock's gym after diglett i've got double kick and that should be all that i need for brock unless nidoran isn't going to be durable enough to survive long enough however when i defeat the junior trainer santro nidoran actually levels up to 13. so this is because it has a medium slow growth rate and that makes leveling quick early on even with this extra level i want to play safe this is a race after all and it's a first playthrough so saving before major battles is a must [Music] brock leads with geodude i use double kick it does a quarter with each hit tackle doesn't do much even with a crit and that's just niran's defense for you i take the living boulder out and his ace onyx hits the field it out speeds uses bide i've already selected double kick which does about a third i can choose to stall the bide out now with growl but it's already accumulated some damage so brock's snake unleashes and honestly i thought it was going to do more after two more turns of double kick onyx falls and that's a 5 minute and 54 second brock split for me that's a quick and easy early game for the poisonous rodent in yellow version how will van man get by brock in blue though his nidoran has access to the same starting moves but unfortunately it learns poison staying at level 14 instead of double kick brock's team has a double resistance to poison moves and you might wonder if poison would be a good strategy here but brock has five full heals per pokemon and uses them one hundred percent of the time that a status is inflicted so that's not an option either way fan man's gonna need to train and because of the level curve in viridian forest he chooses an interesting approach to do this in brock's gym he faces the junior trainer at level eight the goal here is to defeat the diglett gain the trainer boosted experience it provides and then out at the following sandshrew that would teleport him back to the pokemon center which isn't too far away and then he can repeat this process over and over until nidoran is at a high enough level to defeat the sandra as well and here's how it goes oh okay i can't beat the diglett he heads back to viridian forest and after one encounter nidoran levels up so he tries to diglett again this time nidoran is strong enough and sandra takes it out now let the daylight knockouts begin i will note that this junior trainer is different in yellow his santro doesn't know sand attack there but it does here so yeah this is a point for blue again also if you've watched a lot of my videos i usually count blackouts as resets but we won't be doing that today at level 15 he defeats the sandshrew heals up and faces brock for the first time geodude leads van man's strategy is to lower its attack with growl so that it's only doing 1 damage per turn however after 6 growls it's still dealing 2 damage that's unfortunate he starts using scratch which is uninspiring while this slugfest plays out let's compare brock's two different teams in yellow version his geodude is level 10 and his onyx is level 12 but in blue both of them are two levels higher that gives geodude defense curl in addition to tackle in some cases for example if the pokemon is a special attacker this is actually good for the solo pokemon because then jude can not attack and the pokemon can proceed to onyx without taking damage but in this case i think it's bad defense girl slows the fight down a lot brock's onyx does have a small difference between the two games and that's that it has bind in yellow but not in blue while bind is very annoying i think that the level difference and defense curl makes the fight harder for nidoran in blue not even considering its move pool so let's give blue another difficulty point the early game is very clearly harder in this game fan man does manage to knock jude out nidoran levels up healing it back into orange and next is onyx but there's no way that this is gonna work out for him it's only taking one damage from scratch and tackle so that's it more training is required and as he gets started the clock is passing 12 minutes so let's catch up with where i'm at at this point well i've just made it to cerulean city pause just a second this is editor scott i skipped something very important in the initial edit let's rewind further back further back okay okay here that's it now we can go back to cerulean city today i decided to face the rival on nugget bridge first because nidoran's special won't hold up very well against misty spiro gets taken below half with double kick peck does a sixth and double kick finishes it it's time for the sand attacking devil my least favorite opponent but today it just uses scratch double kick is perfect for the following rotata as well as his ace eevee now i'm off to smash the rest of the trainers on nugget bridge fan man on the other hand is still grinding in the forest against the trainers that he skipped because he backtracked he heads so far back into the forest that he decides to face the optional rival west of viridian city his knit around is level 17 so this is going to be a good way to gain some easy trainer experience well apparently though this pidgey is a lot scarier than its spiro counterpart in yellow for nidoran it blinds with sand attack while it does go down nidoran isn't in a good position to face the bulbasaur who sets up leech seed really you're gonna knock me out with leaf seed is that what's happening i only have two sand attacks just hit bro are you kidding me it's gonna knock me out with leaf seed [Music] oh boy okay so van man loses a second time against his rival this bulbasaur really has it out for nidoran it's thinking to itself you thought i'd be the easiest to face you're so wrong he chooses not to try again i don't blame him and he heads back to the forest to continue training another difference here is that while pikachu spawn as a rare one percent encounter for regular playthroughs this is a lot better than yellow's level 9 pidgeotto but in a solo challenge where you need to train the pidgeotto would give more experience so that's another point for blue version at level 18 he decides to try brock again this time he has a similar strategy he uses growl four times to lower jude's attack and while he's doing this judo just refuses to tackle and it sets up defense curl over and over well actually since it's doing one damage each i might as well switch to poison sting unless poison sting isn't 100 accurate because i just missed three times in a row so we were both confused here what's happening well in generation one nearly everything rounds down so when the damage is supposed to be less than one it doesn't round up to one instead it rounds down to zero the game has no way to show that the attack did no damage other than just saying that the attack missed so geodude's defense curls lowered poison sting's damage enough that it was rounding down to zero even with this setback and the lost turns van man still defeats the geodude and moves on to onyx he uses screech and then goes for bide which gives van man full setup with growl also he's outspeeding the rock snake so he can prevent all the damage from bide by just failing growl over and over now the fact that this onix lacks bind is really nice because this fight is very close nidoran's in the red onyx is dealing one damage a hit and van man finally manages to take it down his knit round clocks in with a time of 19 minutes and 20 seconds against brock and blue version playing yellow version allowed me to get past brock 13 minutes and 26 seconds faster this is a huge lead it's almost as one-sided as hitmonlee vs hitmonchan as van man exits the gym i'm on the ssn fighting for the rest tm went ahead get more ahead so i'm gonna play as safely as possible to improve my consistency from here on out you might be wondering did i face misty and the answer is no i decided to skip her so that i could learn body slam first you might wonder why i didn't teach knitter and dig after i got it from the rocket outside cerulean city funnily enough it can't learn dig it's so strange that a pokemon that evolves into a park ground type can't learn any ground moves through level up or through tm i grabbed the rare candy which is very important i'm not skipping any of these today because nidoran is after all a poison type as i'm battling the rival i take a moment and i thank the commenters in my twitch chat thanks for reminding me about the bed to rest in on the ssn i really appreciate it so today you learned there's no bed on the ssn that lets you heal the only way that you can heal on the ssn is with the tm rest or with a potion but where's the fun in that i used charmander to dig back to cerulean city body slam the golden trainer and then i face misty [Music] star use first body slam almost knocks it out taking it to red and causing paralysis as a result it fails to attack and i knock it out starmie moves first using bubble beam but it does only a third to nidoran and a retaliatory body slam causes paralysis so now nidoran's moving first and its next body slam crits taking the starfish out i expected that fight to be a bit more challenging well i'll take it that's a 22 minute and 32 second misty split i backtrack south to vermilion city to face surge ride shoes first it'll be really nice to have dig against the electric mouse and i reflect on that here poison bunny can summon snowstorms and lightning but can't dig raichu uses mega punch doing one third to nidoran and my body slam gets a crit doing massive damage raichu has red health i think that i've got this however it's still faster and uses thunderbolt i cannot believe that nidorad survived that bodyslam connects and raichu goes down so in yellow version nidoran clocks in with a time of 23 minutes and 31 seconds in the surge split one advantage for van man is that he was over leveled for brock and this lets him skip many of the trainers in mount moon while he's in the cave he catches himself a geodude this is another difference between yellow and blue in yellow version charmander is a gift and it's the perfect hm mule because you can teach it cut dig and strength in blue version you don't get a convenient gift pokemon like this so you have to plan to catch a pokemon to use hm's on geodude can learn dig as well as strength but it can't learn cut coming back to what i alluded to before van man chose to play blue version instead of red because wild sand true spawn before mount moon and after mount moon they're a great charmander replacement because they can learn cut dig and strength so in this case because he has to catch hm mules blue is once again more difficult just before the end of the cave it becomes very clear that van man doesn't know what the right choice is anyways and then we get to see another difference between the games there's no jessie and james in blue when i watch other youtubers playing red and blue i'm always so surprised when they don't get ambushed going down this ramp once van man reaches cerulean city he makes the same choice that i did to fight the rival on nugget bridge before facing misty this battle deserves a full comparison now in yellow he leads with spiro which has pack growl leer and fury attack it can be very annoying by lowering your stats before the rest of the fight or can hit hard with stab flying in normal moves sandshrew follows and this thing is awful because it has sand attack and it's really bulky after that rattata is really annoying because it does a lot of damage with hyperfang and has priority with quick attack and then to finish everything off evie also knows sand attack in blue this fight is quite different pidgeotto knows gus sand attack and quick attack it doesn't get a stab flying move so it only knows three attacks and that makes it more likely to select sand attack the fact that his lead has an accuracy lowering move is really frustrating however you do get a little bit of a break after it goes down because abra only knows teleport as you will remember from my abra video it's basically free experience so you can just set up here if you want or knock it out rata does the same in both games but his starter is different in blue in this case bulbasaur knows tackle growl leech seed and vine whip i think these two teams are fairly comparable the increased difficulty of pidgeotto and the starter are countered out by the free ko on abra in this case i think the yellow version is slightly harder because he has stat lorry moves with spiro and then sand attack with santro immediately following it also all four of his pokemon can damage you so that's the first difficulty point that i'm going to award to yellow fan man takes this rival out without issues and after defeating all the trainers on the following routes he arrives at bill's house in blue you can use dig or an escape rope to get out of here and head back to the last pokemon center that you healed at really make sure that you heal in cerulean city this gives van man a small time savings it's about like five seconds so once again yellow version is slightly harder because of that he mirrors my play heading south to the ssn to get there he's going to have to face the rocket outside of cerulean city the machop is easy to deal with but the following drowsy could be scary because nidoran is a poison type nidoran scratches for one third drugs uses pound and a second scratch takes the psychic type to low health but then drowsy hits with confusion dealing massive damage but nidoran survives and van man takes the victory as a prize the rocket gives him the tm for dig and then he heads south and here he's gonna have to catch another pokemon because he only caught geodude and he didn't get sand true here he picks up bellsprout so you can use cut nice on the ssn he decides to skip the tm for rest he picks up body slam the rare candy and then he faces the rival when comparing these two teams it's pretty obvious that blue version is much harder pidgeotto instead of spiro radicate instead of rattata cadabra instead of abra and an evolved starter instead of eevee also this team has way better type diversity but all of this is just theory because van man sweeps through his team with body slam i will give a difficulty point to blue version here but it was easy for both of us helping van man catch up again is another small version difference that gives a time save in the pokey fan club he can use dig or an escape rope to teleport back to the pokemon center in cerulean city in yellow version this was changed so that you can't actually dig out of here you have to backtrack to diglett's tunnel if you want to dig back to cerulean i get a lot of comments about this so that's why i never dig out of here now it's time for van man to face misty in yellow version her starmie was given the move harden whereas in blue version it lacks it because it only has three moves it's more likely to pick bubble beam as a result this battle is going to be a little bit more difficult for van man in blue version starmie hits the field it starts off with bubble beam dealing one third to knit around maybe body slam can get a paralysis and that will help his first hit almost does half but it fails to paralyze bubble beam hits again taking nidoran down to orange health another hit takes starmie to red but still no paralysis so he's gonna lose if she uses bubble beam again she picks tackle and nidoran emerges victorious because i've defeated surge at this point i have access to tm-24 which is thunderbolt and i can use it to help niran deal with the slowpoke in rock tunnel at the end waiting for me is the self-destructing hiker with his team of rock types because i have access to double kick i can make my way past them very quickly and with that i've made it into the mid game unfortunately for van man double kick is still far away he chooses to pass through rock tunnel before defeating surge so he also doesn't have access to thunderbolt body slam and bite are good enough for the slow poke but the self-destructing hiker could be quite challenging so what's his strategy against these notoriously tough rock types well it's ingenious he uses growl to lower geodude's attack stat this way when it uses self-destruct it does less damage to nidoran the second geodude uses three moves before it finally blows up because of this it does even less damage gravelers last growl hits so many times and when it finally self-destructs nidoran's able to survive i really expected this battle to be much more challenging without double kick well played van man still i'm gonna give the difficulty point to blue here let's compare our times when we exit the tunnel i'm at 28 minutes and three seconds and van man is at 40 minutes and 44 seconds that's a 12 minute and 41 second lead for me and i'm one level ahead still he's managed to gain a bit of ground back since brock before we proceed into the mid game let's go back to something that i mentioned at the start of the video the bike it's time to compare it starting on route 9 i used it and van man didn't this continued all the way until we both reached the underground tunnel before celadon to do this comparison i've cut out all the battles and only included footage of the player when the character is moving to be fair i've also included the footage of when i selected to use the bike because there's always time lost whenever you open your inventory how do these two different approaches stack up well if we played at regular game speed it's very obvious that the bike is gonna be the better approach you're just moving faster but on four times speed it's not clear that this is the better approach here's the reason why the bike can be hard to control and as a result the player can make more mistakes they stack up and this leads to time lost if the bike is used poorly i've practiced the bike a lot so i think i'm gonna be faster but what i'm really surprised by when i'm watching this footage is that i don't get ahead of van man until the very end of the tunnel when i'm back outside my movement speed advantage does start to build up still i only arrive five seconds faster that's a very small marginal advantage from using the bike also this section of the game is one of the best spots for it so it's really not a game changer alright back to the playthroughs after all that speed on the bike things are going to have to slow down for me now because i really need to start training yellow version throws significant hurdles at poison types in the mid game koga the self-rival and sabrina are waiting for me and they all have powerful psychic-type moves my typical strategy against them is to out speed and ko as quickly as possible however knit around female is quite slow and there's no way that i'm going to be able to get 104 speed to move first against koga's venomoth or sabrina's abra 85 speed for the rival's cadabra does seem more manageable but either way i'm going to need to over level to prevent losing time to backtracking i'm going to fight as many trainers as i can along each route that i go through i pick up the hidden items in the underground tunnel i heal and cylidon deposit some items pick up the pp up and head into the rocket hideout in here i do something that i very rarely do i fight optional trainers this guy has five pokemon so he's efficient training i grab the nugget and the horn drill tm unfortunately nidoran female can't learn it despite the fact that it has a horn like look at it that's a horn why can't it learn this anyways i'll just sell it for money on the next floor down i fight this rocket specifically so that i can access the double edge tm this move i typically don't like to use because of the recoil damage i really hate recoil damage but today i think it's going to be helpful the most important reason that i'm here though is so that i can pick up the rare candy after that i hit to the department store and here i realized that the nugget and horn drill tm are not actually that useful because i was just auto piloting i forgot that there's a rule against buying vitamins so yeah i guess i gotta use this money for something else i buy some super potions and this is gonna prevent trips to the pokemon center while i'm grinding against trainers as i entered pokemon tower a nice coincidence happened on stream because the let's go soundtrack had arrived at the lavender town music at the exact same time this is a great track by the way the rival's easy to defeat and after that i have to contend with the chandler's ghastly nidoran is fast enough to out speed but unfortunately it's special isn't quite enough to knock them out in one hit i would have liked to spend time training here if i was able to get the one hit but since i can't that's going to be a risky choice the ghastly are very trolly cycling road's next this place is great to train so i save i'm playing conservatively with my time lead and then i start to grind i'm not gonna fight all the trainers especially the ones that are really out of the way on the left-hand side of the route but i will fight everyone that's clustered at the top after that i grabbed the hidden rare candy and pp up thunderbolt zaps the bird keepers just outside of fuchsia city and all this training pays off in a small benefit within the safari zone nidoran is now a high enough level to make repels repel all of the wild encounters so i'm able to travel through the grass without any interruptions the vitamins here are important after feeding them to knit around and grabbing the key items i date back to celidon the grind continues in erica's gym i said that there was gonna be a lot of training and i really meant it like there is so much training when you're using a poison type i defeat every single trainer in here and then i go up against erika herself [Music] is the lead i use body slam it does over one third and then the vines bind it lasts only two turns wasting the least possible time body slam takes tangela into orange and then it uses constrict that's probably the worst move in the game i finish it off and weapon bells next it only knows moves that are not very effective so it does very little damage to nidoran and then it faints and it's the same story with gloom i clock in with a time of 45 minutes and 51 seconds fan man takes a different approach to this section of the game he skips the max ether only fights the mandatory gambler and then skips the hideout entirely after buying and selling some items he grabs fly and heads to erica's gym where he also defeats every single trainer but he still hasn't finished surge he backtracks through saffron city and in surges gym he fights some trainers for extra experience it's been a while since i saw these trainers in battle by the way my software failed to solve the trashcan puzzle for him so he just paused the timer and solved it to be fair now it's time for surge he's much different in blue than he is in yellow for one he has more than a single pokemon and that alone makes him more difficult he also has good ai whereas in yellow he doesn't but because of nidoran's typing that isn't going to be an impact today his team is at lower levels and honestly the pikachu and voltorb aren't good vanman and i discussed which surge we thought was more difficult but in the end i don't think there is one nidoran is pretty good against both of them with this badge under his belt van man can now use fly to take him back to celadon now let's compare erica's teams between the two games when considering levels her team in yellow is much stronger however in blue she has victory bell and vileplume instead of weep and bell in gloom in both games she has good ai however her move sets in yellow are slightly better weave and bell has acid which is a stab poison move and tangela has two grass type moves in the form of vine whip and mega drain the thing is once again that both teams are easy for nidoran to defeat i compared the total hit points of each team members and erika has more in yellow looking at the stats of each pokemon side by side the victory bell and vileplume are stronger than their yellow counterparts while the tangla is much weaker in blue so that's a second gym leader that i don't really think we can award a difficulty point for fan man clocks in with a time of 48 minutes and 38 seconds despite the massive time loss at brock van man is only 2 minutes and 47 seconds behind me but time alone doesn't tell the whole story because i've been investing and leveling against optional trainers as a result i'm nine levels ahead also i've finished pokemon tower cycling road and the safari zone so van man still has some catching up to do can he do it he's avoiding optional trainers and that's one way also in the safari zone he grabs some extra vitamins to boost nidoran's stats with the key items obtained he heads back to koga's gym smart play while the jugglers in here have psychic types that could be a threat he's able to take care of them without a reset to level up a bit more he fights this optional trainer who has sand slash quality slam does a quarter and van man decides to reset after sand attack okay so maybe don't fight sandslash instead he goes to the celadon department store where he buys several reflect tms interesting all right one of those is probably going to be used for koga next he goes to silf where he can gain the level that he wanted as well as grab some vitamins then he backtracks to the gym where he saves and fights koga immediately yes he is officially doing the fifth gym before me and then this coco time oh i started the fight without teaching reflect ah really i misclicked again and i just talked to okay don't press a in blue coca's actually a poison type gym leader he has two coughing a muck and a wheezing reflect is useful here because it has physical damage and in generation one it never wears off unless you switch out which doesn't happen in solo challenges fan man uses reflect first turn coffin uses smoke screen and fails body slam does one third it paralyzes coughing and that prevents an attack batman tries thunderbolt which does more damage to coughing it uses tackle and then faints on the next turn koga sends out muk next thunderbolt does what looks like one-fifth and muk uses disable taking away van man's electric type attack muk gets some damage in with sludge but then it goes down after that nidoran has half health remaining for the rest of the battle koga sometimes uses x attacks and he does on coughing wasting time this one goes down without any damage last is wheezing and this is the reason that van man wanted reflect if you look at this pokemon's expression like you can just see how much pain it's in it's like about to explode and when it self-destructs you want to be prepared but van man's rodent survives because of reflect with 10 hit points and he takes the victory he clocks in with a time of 1 hour and 29 seconds his coca split is ahead of mine for the first time in the play through he's taken the lead the reason is that in yellow koga's very different while he still has poison types there are dual types including a bug typing now which removes their weakness to ground attacks it does remove a resistance to poison type as well because bug is weak to poison in generation one however these aren't the reasons that nidoran is gonna struggle here the real issue is his movesets all of his pokemon no psychic the venonats have speed stats ranging from 51 to 55 so i'm going to out speed them already but the venomoth has 103. as my nidoran is nearing level 50 it only has 78 as i predicted before there's no way that i'm gonna be moving first against his ace when i heard van man say that he was gonna go and fight koga i was like oh no like i should probably go and give koga a try too so that i don't fall too far behind like this is starting to get bad after all i had trained very rigorously like i think maybe my over leveled nidoran can do it before that i decide that i should take care of the trainers in the gym i don't want to lose out on this experience i save in front of this guy easy as a level 38 hypno and apparently this was a really good choice hypno is really good and so it gives me my first reset next i actually experienced a program error here where my knitter and stats were calculated incorrectly so like whoops we were working on a lot of technical stuff when we were doing this challenge it's like a first attempt anyways mistakes happen so that's another reset for me i think there's an interesting parallel here how van man reset twice because he forgot reflect then he was clicking too fast and i had two resets in the same gym anyways here's the thing after i beat the last juggler i checked my speed and it's 83 rivals cadabra and self has 84 as i mentioned before so i think that that's going gonna be the safer fight to attempt now i'm gonna grab some reflect tms in the department store first while i do that let's compare the rivals teams between the two games in blue there are some serious duds pidgeot and growlithe specifically like ah so bad nidorad has thunderbolts to counter the gyarados but alakazam is terrifying venusaur shouldn't be that bad but razor leaf could deal decent damage if it gets a crit in yellow sand slash has slash and sand attack which are terrifying he has good ai so he won't use poison sting either magneton can confuse with supersonic or paralyze with thundershock ninetails is probably the worst member of his team cadabra has the same move set as the alakazam does but it's got worse stats of course finally vaporeon's moves really aren't very good with the exception of sand attack of course it is in fact the best move in the game because of alakazam alone though i think that i'm going to give the difficulty point here to the rival in blue but how is it going to play out in practice let's see sand slash is first i set up reflect and get hit with sand attack that's a great start just fantastic body slam does one third sand slash slashes doing about a quarter i take it to red swift does very little and then i miss because of my accuracy i do manage to take it out next is magneton here nidoran crits and takes it on one turn that's nice nine tails is next body slime takes it to orange and then ember burns nidoran okay so i guess that that's the way that this fox is more than useless it can burn me i need to hit again but sand attack has something to say about that and i missed not once not twice but three times before i knocked the nine tails out the burn damage at this point is starting to stack up i was hoping that a level up would happen here before the cadabra to give me the speed i need but it doesn't and the psychic type moves first and that's it so i really need the speed i shouldn't attempt this fight again without it time to face a few more trainers and that'll give me the level that i need because i've defeated pretty much everyone in silf this training takes me to the beach south of fuchsia city i almost never fight these guys here i reflected on the fact that i fought most of the trainers between lavender town and celadon in erica's gym on cycling road after cycling road in koga's gym and on route 15. oh yeah i forgot i've also done the dojo and silf so i'm starting to run out of areas where i can train efficiently i would really like to train in pokemon mansion and in blaine's gym but i can't get there because koga's badge gives me access to surf at least the second trainer here on the beach levels in iran up and that gives me the speed that i need to move first against the cadabra however before i reattempt the rival van man has also reached him as well after the brock split i didn't think that it would be possible that he would overtake me plus his nidoran is doing it at the low level of 41. he sets up reflect turn one and this pidgeot is awful because it knows whirlwind which does nothing in trainer battles okay uh erica i was unfair before constrict is not in fact the worst move two thunderbolts fry the bird gyarados is next and surprisingly it isn't a one hit even with four times damage nidoran levels up growleth comes out body slam does half paralyzing the doggo and it uses roar which has the same effect as whirlwind next is alakazam and this psychic titan is terrifying he uses psi beam taking knit around all the way down to red health in the next fight gyarados takes nidoran down with hydropump alright so i guess thunderbolt isn't really a counter to it at this level van man considers using some rare candies to solve that problem but decides against it and fights a trainer to level up once before he uses them six rare candies later he tries again at level 48. on the way leveling up he also learned to double kick i guess better late than never right by the way he saves before he goes into this fight so that means these rare candies are forever gone they are used he cannot get them back as we've already established the pidgeot is completely awful unless it gets a big crit with quick attack and it actually does decent amount of damage gyarados is next it's still surviving a thunderbolt and then almost knocks nidoran out with hydropump yikes body slime takes care of the growleth alright can he defeat the alakazam confusion first man that's it so not this time how's he gonna solve it well he can fish for a body slam paralysis arriving with full health confusion now does less than half he rolls body slam but doesn't get paralysis alakazam uses confusion again and amazingly nidoran survives on one hit point and knocks the psychic type out here's the problem though the rival still has venusaur i said that it wouldn't be much of a problem but nidoran actually needs health to make that true so that's another loss for van man alright check this out this is how things occurred in real time after everything in the early game we're both here fighting the sylph rival at the exact same time my issue in this fight is that sand slash is just hitting sand attacks and nidoran just goes down again ah great in this moment i was feeling pretty bad about it sand attack stop sanitating just use anything else in this case body slam paralyzes sand slash he uses swift and then can't move allowing me to knock it out without having my accuracy lowered magneton's next i use body slam it doesn't take it out but it just goes for sonic boom so i proceed to the next pokemon without being paralyzed or confused unfortunately the ninetails crits with ember and does a lot of damage just trying to be useful nidoran only has about half health left now and this is the first time that i move first against the kadabra and knock it out with body slam so i've made it to his vaporeon for the first time i feel like it's worth pointing out here vaporeon just really wants to piss me off by using sand attack first turn why does it know this move it's level 40. i use body slam first turn but maybe thunderbolt will do more looks about the same after all vaporeon has a beastly special stat i miss a thunderbolt but the next one paralyzes nidoran moves first and i've defeated the rival with this victory i'm going to be able to defeat jesse and james and giovanni and with that will come some extra experience hopefully preparing me for koga because unless i want to backtrack to some really undesirable areas in order to do more training the only sensible thing to do is for me to face him going into this race i thought i'd gain some time at brock but not nearly as much as i did but i figured i'd struggle so much through the mid game and van man would easily overtake me the fact that the brock split lead was so long has given me a fighting chance to put out competitive results here if nidoran got double kick earlier in blue i really think i would be behind by now so maybe i can defeat koga before van man beats the rival in silf the issue for him is that while he can make it to the venusaur he always arrives with low health and he can't defeat it he doesn't have access to any recovery moves because he skipped the rest tm on the ssn so he has to fish for paralysis at some point it's going to prevent alakazam from attacking and he'll be able to win but will that happen before i beat koga i decide to adjust my strategy here i've already cleared itself so i can pick up the mimic tm from copycat it's gonna really help against koga his first venonat knows sleep powder and i can mimic it and use it against the rest of his team since i outspeed i'm gonna be able to put his second and third venonat to sleep before they hit me with an attack and then i can arrive at the venomoth with decent health unfortunately the first one lowers my special with psychic before i put it to sleep next i setup reflect and then it wakes up and it gets me with another psychic because i was clicking too fast ah so this really isn't good i know that i need to be able to take at least one hit from the venom off also i might need to take another hit from the second or third venonat if sleep powder misses or uh sleep powder could just miss here against the first one and nidoran goes down anyways i try again and this time i make it to the second venonat but i've taken a lot of damage and eventually nidoran goes down again and again and here's where i should write a line in the script about inaccurate sleep tactics and yeah yeah yeah but honestly i think that just attacking with body slam isn't gonna cut it i need the health for venomoth so now i'm stuck just like van man waiting on the status condition during his fights against the rival he's figured out that gyarados is actually a roll with thunderbolt he misses it here it uses leer badge boosting his attack growlithe follows and it also uses leer giving him another badge boost and that allows body slam to one hit the following alakazam finally he's made it to the venusaur with green health body slam looks like it's going to be a three hit venusaur's razor leaf takes him to half and then vine whip does much less with that he's finally able to defeat the rival and he's maintained the lead i think at this point it's time to award yellow the difficulty point for koga i sort of feel like giving yellow two points for him but i'll have restraint don't worry i won't get emotional here even though the resets are really starting to stack up for me despite all the training i did i just need sleep to cooperate come on finally it does venomoth is put to sleep and i knock it out with three uses of body slam at long last i've earned the soul badge it boosts my speed and takes nidoran up to 100 unfortunately all the resets here mean that i've lost a bit of my level lead i'm only seven levels above van man now so next for both of us is blaine because why would either of us want to face sabrina now we're both fighting every single trainer we encounter because we need to prepare for the late game van man used six rare candies already but my strategy has been to invest in leveling throughout the entire playthrough minimize backtracking time and then use all my rare candies in the late game when they allow me to skip significant experience after all nidoran's medium slow growth rate does require more and more experience the higher level it gets things are really close here and i actually managed to make it to blaine first so let's compare his teams between the two games yellow he has higher levels all final stage pokemon and better move sets this is uh definitely a difficulty point for yellow blane might be the most improved gym leader of them all they even fixed his glitchy super potion ai issues in a blue by the way he can use a super potion when his pokemon is at full health the problem for me and yellow now is that his pokemon are very well balanced they have strong physical attacks and strong special attacks my nidoran gets beat up by ninetales flamethrower and it only has half health left for the rapidash of course this horse is fast it hits takedown lowers my attack with growl and then crits for the ko okay let's try that again this time flamethrower crits and i'm in even worse shape however rapidash messes up really badly and they take it out but arcanine finishes me off okay third time's the charm i should be able to do this come on a crit with the i'm resetting crit crit and burn on flame throw our first turn uh it takes me down to like one third [Music] okay playing is bad plane is very bad so that's five resets against him in my sixth battle nidoran gets confused but it's still able to knock the nine tails out i set up reflect on rapidash and since it used growl i don't want to be using a physical move anymore i take it out with thunderbolt arcanine's last i've made it here with green health i decided to use body slam turn one for the increased chance for paralysis but it doesn't work so i decided to use thunderbolt instead it can get paralysis as well it just isn't as likely arcanine uses flamethrower nidoran survives with half health and it looks like i can take one more of those but then the next flamethrower crits are you kidding me this is brutal come on please let me get through blaine i make it back to the arcanine my second body slam paralyzes fireblast misses and then paralysis prevents its attack thunderbolt knocks it out and nidoran gets a time of 1 hour 18 minutes and 11 seconds on bullying okay so in yellow version i've done it how will van man do against him in blue well blaine leads with growlithe yes growlithe here's the thing about it because of blaine's good ai which was removed in yellow by the way this doggo is only gonna spam agility against nidoran giving van man a free reflect ponyta's next yes ponyta it uses tail whip badge boosting knit around before it faints rapidash is at such a low level that nidoran is faster body slam does half stomp does so little and the fire horse faints arcanine is all that's left body slime crits arcanine survives the next one but it doesn't do any damage and that's it nidorad clocks in with a time of 1 hour 19 minutes and 40 seconds in pokemon blue i've regained the lead at this point but only by a minute and a half things are very close because all seven gyms must be complete before the player faces giovanni we can't delay facing sabrina any longer we both take our time to level up against the trainers in her gym while we grind let's review sabrina's teams in blue version she has four pokemon good ai and a venomoth which is an extremely powerful psychic type rivaling even her level 43 alakazam what i find most surprising here is that this alakazam doesn't have psychic its most powerful move is just sci-beam in yellow her team shrinks from four members to three she loses her good ai and venomoth unfortunately but gains levels across the board all of her pokemon are level 50 which is unfortunate because that makes them very fast her lead avra is so annoying in solo challenges because it only knows flash so it ruins your accuracy before the rest of the fight both the following cadabra and alakazam have psychic 2 but at least she doesn't have good ai batman has to start by facing cadabra it's only level 38 so nidoran moves first with body slam and takes the psychic type out mr mime's next body slam takes it to orange confusion does a quarter and sabrina's second pokemon falls body slime hits venomoth and van man gets lucky ooh good we got a clutch uh paralysis on the venomos that prevents it from moving and he takes it out last is alakazam its level might only be 43 but it's still faster allowing it to set up reflect before getting hit by body slam it does one third and causes paralysis nidoran attacks again looks like a three hit alakazam uses sideways dealing almost no damage and nidoran finishes it off van man beats sabrina on his first attempt clocking in with a time of 1 hour 21 minutes and 49 seconds how will i fare in yellow version abra's first and it looks like i'm like an amazing planner because i have 104 speed that's exactly one above her lead allowing me to avoid flash cadavers next it misses cywave because that move is trash in every way and then body slam finishes it off alakazam goes first mirroring its play against van man by selecting reflect right away body slam does a third sabrina uses an x defend which she doesn't have in blue by the way she has a hyper potion alakazam does pitiful amounts of damage with zywave two turns in a row and as a result i emerged victorious on my first attempt as well that's a time of one hour 19 minutes and 27 seconds i've increased my lead just slightly to two minutes fan man decides to do some errands before giovanni he heads back to pick up the tm for double edge and the rare candy in the rocket hideout on the other hand i know how scary giovanni is in yellow and i'm overlevelled so i decide to face him right away because i'm likely gonna need many attempts his team got a mind-blowing upgrade in yellow version look at his movesets now he has earthquake on four of his five pokemon the persian is scary because it has double team and slash which gets the stab bonus and to top all of this off his entire team got level boosts i start by setting up reflect to minimize damage and then i mimic earthquake but doug trio hits fissure and takes nidoran out i taught blizzard specifically for this fight so i can take the mole out quickly but persian is faster and it lands two hits with slash before fainting i've only got red health left for nidoqueen now i take it out with a single hit but nidoking survives and finishes nidoran off with earthquake alright i refuse to lose this one anymore let's play dirty i use mimic to steal persian's double team and it's key to note here that only the tm for double team is banned as i set it up it also triggers the badge boost glitch raising my other stats i did get hit twice during the setup so nidoran can't afford to be hit again but with the boosts i should be able to one hit from here out persian falls nidoqueen falls nito king falls and does ride on a clock in with a time of 1 hour 24 minutes and 20 seconds after all his errands van man faces giovanni the blue team is completely ineffective these move sets are terrible poison stink on the neatos are you kidding me therefore van man quickly dispatches all the team members and clocks in with a time of 1 hour 26 minutes and 58 seconds there are only 6 trainers left first is the pre-league rival i set up reflect mimic slash accidentally use thunderbolt and then i one shot with blizzard the eggs are next blizzard misses i get seated and then i move on to the magneton i don't really have a great choice here so it takes three turns to knock out after that i really need cadaver to be nice i've mimicked slash specifically for it but i don't get a crit because nidoran's base speed isn't high enough to ensure that and that's it i try again but ninetails gets me because of paralysis and then i start to lose over and over and then this happens i'm trying to get through the rival yeah there we go okay i froze the magneton so i needed to get by the magneton yes yes froze it as well all right i paralyzed the vaporeon and take it out with thunderbolt now i'm on my way to the league at one hour 28 minutes and 53 seconds so here's the rivals team that van man has to face honestly all of these pokemon are countered by nidoran's current move set thunderbolt for pidgeot double kick for ryhorn thunderbolt for gyarados and body slam for growleth since the rival has good ai he's locked into agility with pidgeot and growlithe so vanman's never gonna take any damage against them but after all these easy pokemon alakazam comes out it uses cybeem and critical hit come on okay so the next one won't be a crit right yeah that is correct it'll be psychic instead which takes nidoran out in a single hit psychic one shots us from almost full health with no crit and then it happens again so van man decides to use rare candies to get a higher level maybe he'll survive a hit now he is at full health after all come on psy beam well critical hit of course in the next fight alakazam gets paralyzed nidoran hangs on and he takes it out but there's still a venusaur left he goes for a body slam it does about a quarter maybe a third it's it's hard to tell fine whip takes knit around to red body slam paralyzes but razor leaf crits instead of trying to brute force it he decides to head to the power plant and grab an extra rare candy while he's doing this how far ahead was i able to get well i made it to indigo plateau but i also decided to backtrack and grab the rear candy from the power plant as well so we're in here at the exact same time after i grab it i think that's it i've saved all my rare candies to this point i've trained until my fingers bled and i'm really wishing that this was the summer of 69 it might not be but at least i can hope for a nice time against the league here we go [Music] lorelie's first this fight is gonna be tense i need to have enough health coming out of the fight with cloister to be able to set up amnesia against slowbro after that i should be able to sweep dewgong delays my efforts by using rest i take it out cluster hits a decent ice beam but it doesn't freeze and my second thunderbolt finishes it okay please slow bro don't use psychic amnesia that's good and bro goes for amnesia again and again okay i actually might get full setup here yup slowbro just keeps trying to set up despite being able to use psychic and i polish it off with thunderbolt over two turns i zap the jinx in a single hit and the lapras is no different moving on to the next room i'm not really sure who this guy is while he dispatch him let's quickly check in with van man okay so the pre-league rival is still beating him up it's pretty frustrating that he's struggling here because of one pokemon basically yes the venusaur finishes them off a lot of the time because the alakazam does go down but really it's just the alakazam and how much damage it can do alright let's head back to this fight this guy was so easy especially when i freeze his machamp agatha's next in yellow version this is where rest starts to become incredible it can be paired with mimicked substitute to give your pokemon increased consistency in this fight substitute prevents confusion tactics but it doesn't prevent sleep so hypnosis is still a risk it's not a foolproof strategy but it is overall a really safe bet the downside of this strategy is that it takes time to work but if you're patient it pays off let's uh let's call it say the agatha investment and it's time to cash in on another investment now i'm going to use my rare candies to dramatically increase nidoran's level before the fight i really want to be able to defeat her on my first attempt i'm not playing around so as i mentioned this investment doesn't hedge against gengar's hypnosis and yeah it puts nidoran to sleep and psychic ends the battle so that's one loss in the next fight agatha switches into golbat when i use mimic so that's a reset because this triggers a glitch where mimik copies a move permanently it actually doesn't replace mimic it replaces a different move in your move set i really don't want this to happen so i reset and i make it back to the final gengar it misses hypnosis okay that's good that's how hypnosis is supposed to work blizzard hits i don't get a freeze and then hypnosis puts me to sleep nidoran wakes up gets put back to sleep with hypnosis psychic breaks my substitute nidoran wakes up i go for blizzard but i'm not faster and psychic ends it so that's three resets in the next battle i have to heal against golbat and agatha switches in haunter luckily it's the turn i wake up but in generation 1 healing paralysis doesn't recover the lost speed so the ghost moves first and puts it around back to sleep are you kidding me dream eater does half nidoran wakes up but haunter once again uses hypnosis no i refuse to no i refuse to believe that she's allowed to do that i refuse that she i okay my substitute broke she put me to sleep i woke up she put me back to sleep and then dream eater me this is not going well so that's four resets i appear to have hit a wall this time i try to re-establish substitute against her final gengar and of course it gets me with hypnosis i should have just kept attacking when i lost my first substitute i could have gotten a freeze after all so this is five resets at this pace van man is probably going to be able to defeat the rival before i get past agatha well especially if alakazam uses reflect and doesn't attack nidoran ooh two reflects three reflects awesome okay now we win and we got the paralysis on venusaur okay great finally we got past it okay so now i'm going to knock out a bunch of the uh trainers in victory road as well just so we can get past the champions alakazam he's headed to victory road now while i attempt agatha for the sixth time this fight is frustrating usually mimic and rest together are enough but female nidoran's speed stat and weakness to psychic moves is really holding it back haunter gets a hypnosis because of course it does but nidoran wakes up paralyzes with thunderbolt and knocks it out the following arbok isn't an issue you use this opportunity to heal with rest luckily for me she doesn't switch to gengar and with the cobra out of the way all that remains between me and the final two trainers in the game is her ace gengar i used blizzard and i was praying for a freeze freeze freeze freeze freeze without it gengar confuses nidoran which causes self-inflicted damage psychic does two thirds nidoran snaps out of confusion and re-establishes its substitute then agatha uses the dreaded hypnosis it misses but so does nidoran agatha tries hypnosis again misses serves her right and blizzard doesn't get the ko or the freeze gengar is going to get another attack in now i decide to use thunderbolt for the boosted accuracy and unfortunately agatha does the perfect play by healing with a super potion and that takes it out of ko range she tries to potion again and when gengar finally selects his last move it gets dream eater so that's it i've defeated her up next is lance and here's the thing about him he has good ai if we compare his teams and move sets it becomes immediately apparent that in yellow he got a big buff the gyarados is unchanged but thunderbolt is probably just gonna one-shot it anyways however all his dragons no longer have agility because of how good ai works in generation one it's going to choose moves that it thinks are super effective against the opponent it only checks the type for this so in blue it would spam agility over and over against nidoran but here they actually have moves that do damage but apparently this doesn't matter because blizzard just tears through all of them anyways aerodactyl is fast and its moves are a lot better in yellow but nidoran is bulky enough to survive one hit and knock it out with blizzard dragonite is easy to clean up and yeah lance was easy i was expecting this to be very different between the games so i'm not gonna give out a difficulty point to either one here maybe when van man reaches lance i'll have to give out the point but i doubt that they'll put more of a fight in blue and speaking of blue he's the only trainer left for nidoran and yellow at this point they still have a sizable lead over van man he's still in victory road battling trainers for levels i just have to be able to knock out the following six pokemon blizzard one shot sand slash that's a good start it's confidence boosting knowing that i can take this thing out without getting hit by earthquake next is alakazam you'll remember that i picked up the tm for double edge in the rocket hideout i did that specifically for this pokemon i get the best possible turn one luck with kinesis missing double-edged hits and oh my gosh kinesis miss on the alakazam and i did not want hit with double edge you can hear a lot of defeat in my voice there that's because i needed to one hit even with all my mid game grinding and saving my rare candies to the last possible moment my speed stat is only 135 where alakazams is 156 i'm never gonna move first against it even after getting hit by one turn of kinesis i won't be badge boosted fast enough to move first on the second turn originally going into this fight i knew it was going to outspeed me and because of its move set i thought that eventually kinesis would miss or it would use psi beam and i'd survive and knock it out with double edge in one hit i was banking on luck but unfortunately now i'm gonna need even more i thought about stealing earthquake as an alternative to double edge because this might be great for super effective damage against his electric and fire types that follow plus it avoids recoil damage when fighting alakazam however that means i have to get hit by an earthquake from sandslash and it does a lot of damage my blizzard misses on turn 2 and sandslash finishes me off i reset as fast as possible because this is gonna take luck so i need to repeat this fight as much as i can in as little time as possible i forgot to use a rare candy for the last fight so here i'll mention something i filmed this before i filmed my smeargle video so i was aware here about damage rounding but i hadn't looked into the exact calculation yet i was under the false impression that leveling up to level 76 might actually make my damage ranges worse than when i'm at level 75 so yeah that's why i'm not using the second row candy to go to level 76 here i take my third loss and now going into the fourth fight against him fan man has finally reached indigo plateau it sort of feels like he's catching up to me again here he makes a decision that is very wise instead of immediately trying to fight the league and catch up he takes his time when i went to get mimic the first time i didn't have enough room so i gotta deposit something it's clear that he's trying to get the best possible time in his game and not necessarily trying to cut every corner and catch up after all we're trying to compare these games fairly and trying to catch up would be very risky because at any moment i could make it past the alakazam and then he'd be stuck in the league in a less than optimal place so let's head back to my champion fight because something interesting is about to happen for the first time i'm able to make it past the alakazam after surviving a psychic and then a kinesis miss the champion's ai modifications manifest as a behavior where exeggutor will use hypnosis every turn that knit around is awake and then switch into damaging moves when it's asleep i do snooze for a bit but eventually nidoran's ready to keep the race going and it knocks the pineapple out i didn't use the mimic strategy so i don't have super effective damage against nine tails i roll for a freeze with blizzard ice isn't resisted by fire in generation one i get a crit and firespin misses so that's good luck thunderbolt secures the ko and then magnaton hits the field blizzard misses screech misses okay that's a wash blizzard connects dealing two fifths screech hits i go for one more blizzard in case of a freeze and magneton strikes back with thunder wave with its speed cut nidoran gets zapped by thunderbolt taking it to half and then i knock the magnets out only vaporeon remains he uses quick attack dealing a small but significant amount because of a crit thunderbolt does less than half vaporeon crits again with quick attack and i use rest to heal i think i've got this i might as well play safe and make sure quick attack finally doesn't crit it uses aurora beam next which doesn't do much and nidoran wakes up two more thunderbolts are all that i need and then the champion uses hydro pump no no no no no no at least nidoran's survived however my position isn't very good because the former paralysis means that i can't move first there's a choice here between attacking and healing i go for rest because i really like rest but when i think about this in retrospect attacking i think is the better choice i could have crit but it doesn't matter because vaporeon outspeeds uses hydro pump and it knocks nidoran out right after that loss van man starts facing lorelei so let's take a look at how her move sets compare between blue and yellow dugong is obviously going to spam a lot of rest in either game cloister is almost the same between the two it could use aurora beam to lower van man's attack stat in yellow it has ice beams so it could freeze the following slow bro on the other hand is completely trivial for nidoran in blue version though because it's only gonna spam amnesia it doesn't actually have psychic her final two pokemon are exactly the same in both games so i think here the difficulty point goes towards pokemon yellow at least theoretically how does it play out in practice because lapras is going to need to cooperate all right lapras i need you to go for body slam not blizzard stop he makes it back to lapras in the next fight thunderbolt doesn't do half lappers uses confused ray but nidoran still thunderbolts for so much damage because of a critical hit so van man's moving on now i stand by my choice though of point assignment in the fight i think despite van man having the reset and me having none i did luck through both slobro and lapras and van man definitely got the short stick here so this guy the lost hiker the worst major battle of the game we do need to compare his blue and yellow teams theoretically this is a lot harder for nidoran in yellow because his onyx has earthquake and the machamp doesn't have fissure but we know that theoretical difficulty doesn't equal practical results so will van man be able to defeat him without a reset oh oops i forgot to teach blizzard so i guess not i haven't figured out a good way to communicate this in my videos but playing at four times speed and being able to see the timer while you play has a psychological impact so many times i've made mistakes like this where i'm just trying to get into the fight two seconds faster and then i don't think and then i'm just like oops i forgot to move so yeah i uh totally feel for you van man this is uh a common occurrence in my playthroughs with blizzard of course van man's able to dispatch his team easily and he's moving on in terms of difficulty point i could give it to yellow but that doesn't really feel right i'm just not going to award one here he's definitely bad in both games while vanman was fighting the hiker i got a question in my twitch chat why don't you save after teaching double edge because i haven't been sure that i don't want mimic because if i save i'm not like there is no other option for strategy i just do this strategy so like i can do it fine but like um now i only have this strategy uh uh steel earthquake from sandslash or slash from sandslash honestly i was a bit frustrated fishing for luck after all if you watch my videos i think you know that i hate this process that's why i test so much so after getting this question i sort of impulsively saved that locks in my double-edged strategy and forever seals away the use of moves like earthquake and slash which you can access through mimic i need to get a freeze now but this fight isn't the one while i continue to ice fish let's compare agatha's teams in blue she's so much more random so many status conditions no substitute to mimic for safety and she has hypnosis on all of her ghosts and for van man this is his chosen path to victory mimic hypnosis put the ghost to sleep and play the lottery while substitute does feel safe i think when considering real time having hypnosis available right away in combination with the fact that our final gengar doesn't know psychic makes this fight easier in blue so difficulty point to yellow of course it's not consistent in either game though but here's how things end up for van man oh first attempt agatha boom van man is going to catch me unless i get very lucky very soon gyarados isn't going down to a single hit from thunderbolt because his nidoran is at a lower level it does a lot of damage with hyper beam but banman takes it out still the dragonairs are free because of agility if only nidoran could set up here then it would be just so amazing i really wish the game developers had given nidoran female a setup move like defense curl skull bash would be cool if only it raised defense in generation 1. in these games it does nothing first turn and then second turn it does damage so yeah it's up pretty bad no no setup no badge boost that's why no one uses it blizzard freezes lance's aerodactyl that's really nice and then quickly defeats dragonite van man has arrived at the champion it's come down to this the final fight as van man prepares for his first fight i'm regretting my choices i've figured out now that mimic would be useful because i can steal hypnosis from exeggutor and then use this on magneton to prevent paralysis by doing this i can ensure that i make it to the vaporeon with my speed stat intact i can also use hypnosis to completely prevent hydropump from finishing it around off either way though i need to get by the alakazam first and this alone is very tough so let's continue to fish for these freezes while van man gives it his first attempt the champions team in blue is extremely different pidgeot's the lead and it's a straightforward ko alakazam's next it's move set is different it knows reflect instead of kinesis so that gives nidoran a one in three chance to not take damage every turn it does mean that double edge is gonna be a three hit though so van man has to live for three turns a critical hit psi beam ends the first battle without a crit psychic taking it around down on the second battle in the third battle pidgeot goes for sky attack and van man makes it to alakazam with full health but a non-critical hit psychic still does enough to ko i need you to reflect and then crit with double edge that's the way that i win this as you can see nidoran is incredibly consistent the consistency of poison types in generation one this pokemon doesn't need any luck at all in either game if you want to have a fun time playing a solo challenge just try a poison type like nidorad now uh realistically we're both just looking for luck here so it's anyone's race in yellow nidoran is level 75 with 50 resets at this point and in blue it's level 66 with 38 resets let's compare the champion teams so sandslash with earthquake is obviously harder to defeat than the pidgeot which knows uh awesome moves like sky attack and whirlwind truly peak champion level performance alakazam knows reflect in blue but kinesis and yellow as i mentioned before so yeah yellow is definitely harder there cadesus is the worst exeggutor is uh awful with hypnosis in yellow and uh rydon is uh yeah what i genuinely stopped writing this script sent van man a message asking him if this thing has ever knocked out one of his pokemon in a solo challenge he responded with yes ditto forgot that he did a ditto challenge you should uh check it out by the way he actually messaged me back after that and said that this ride on was beat on the first attempt with ditto and that the ride on that was truly challenging was giovanni's so yeah this ride-on very bad in blue version his gyarados and venusaur are actually quite decent although the arcanine leaves a lot to be desired it has ember that's because all the move sets in blue are defined by the default moves that these pokemon would learn at this level so yeah only ember for the fiery doggo ninetails is the scarier fire type obviously because it has firespin gyarados takes four times damage from thunderbolt while vaporeon doesn't and magneton is a beast with thunder wave and thunderbolt so yeah difficulty point towards yellow version when i initially started playing these challenges on my channel i actually picked yellow version because i thought it would be harder i was thinking of trainers like koga and then lance with his changed move sets i also thought of lorelei because i know her ai is slightly fixed and her slow bro is slightly more difficult what i didn't think about was the champion and i actually think the champion is the most improved trainer between the two games alright back to the battles magneton gives me another painful defeat meanwhile for van man pidgeot uses whirlwind following it with wing attack and not doing very much damage before fainting alakazam is next he uses reflect once and twice then nidoran's second double edge gets a crit oh good the joke that is right on is next blizzard hits and surprisingly the rhinoceros survives and then in retaliation for all of the mean things that i've said about it it uses fury attack and it gets a crit no not crit with fury attack really so he's gonna move on to gyarados i'm fighting alakazam i survive psychic and then blizzard freezes yes this is what i needed gyarados doesn't fall to a single hit from van man's thunderbolt however it just leers and then he takes it out on the next turn while my nidoran gets its health back we're both starting to move pretty slowly with our decision making by the way it's been two hours of intense gameplay and right now both of us have luck on our side we really don't want to mess these fights up exeggutor puts my knit around to sleep and van man's thunderbolt does almost nothing to arcanine he crits next and another thunderbolt knocks it out mine iran is still sleeping come on wake up please just wake up van man's facing the champions ace now venusaur gets hit by blizzard it does half growth raises its special and that means that the second blizzard won't ko and then van man knocks it out with double edge his nidoran defeats gary and clocks in with a time of 2 hours and 56 seconds with 45 resets at level 67 and a game time of 6 hours and 23 minutes but i'm not far behind i could still get a close result this could be the fight i knocked the executor out nine tails is next it does very little with quick attack after a couple thunderbolts i decide to heal still i get stuck in firespin and ninetails takes knit around within an inch of fainting before i managed to heal up again i wake up knock it out with thunderbolt and now it's magneton time can i please just get another freeze i don't he uses thunderbolt and nidoran fates because it got a critical hit here's a big difference between the games in blue some of the pokemon are sort of just free on the champions team but in yellow all of his team members have some play that can mess the solo pokemon up what this means is that it can be very hard to get through his entire team without having recovery because they slowly whittle you down therefore i've really grown to love rest because it helps most pokemon deal with this challenge however in blue with some of his team members being pretty ineffective it's far more manageable to just go in without rest that gives you access to four move slots instead of three this is why a lot of poke tubers doing red and blue challenges really don't feature rest very much because it just isn't needed as we saw here what i really need here is luck so how long is it gonna take me to beat the game kinesis hits me so that's not good not what i was looking for but then blizzard connects and it freezes yes yes yes yes yes okay not a third time but that's fine yes yes thunderbolt okay you kidding me all right too much excitement too much excitement indeed i take things slower against nine tails and finally finish it off i've got green health for the magneton i do have to it and then because of kinesis i miss my second attack and i have to heal up with rest it takes me to half with thunderbolt to turn it around wakes up and then my double edge takes it out vaporeon is all that's left thunderbolt does half no paralysis okay quick attack does a little and thunderbolt finishes it with style because of a critical hit mined it around clocks in with a time of 2 hours 5 minutes and 0 seconds with 54 resets at level 75 with an in-game time of 5 hours and 55 minutes so nidoran was able to beat blue version with a slightly faster real time at a lower level and with less resets of course it beat yellow version with less game time but that's because there were more resets i think it's fascinating how different these two games are when playing the same pokemon to demonstrate the differences let's look at a couple donut charts nidoran struggled early on in blue because it lacked double kick for brock it took fan man 15 of the time to get his first badge in comparison it only took me five percent of the time to beat brock note these percentage figures for van man include the time left over which is the time by which he won that way these graphics are scaled to each other so we can compare things directly okay back to the analysis the misti split was roughly equivalent and my surge in erica time is inflated because i started to do my training surprising to me is the fact that koga and sylph balanced out between the games taking slightly more time in yellow however i should note that this probably wouldn't have been possible without the training that i preemptively did if i failed major battles and had to backtrack to train i would have been far slower through this portion of the game but that's the advantage of my experience in yellow the next significant advantage that took place was at the pre-league rival where yellow spent four percent of its playthrough time and blue spent 11 percent of its time after that the elite four was the same but i spent three times the amount of time on the champion three times in total this battle took me almost one-fifth of my total play time the question at the start of the video was which game does knit around female have an easier time beating in a solo challenge well it's close very close both games provided a lot of challenges to the player but in the end pokemon blue appears to be slightly easier for this little poisonous rabbit regularly at this point i go back test and optimize my playthroughs but i'll release a knit around male vs knit around female video in the future and i'll cover my optimizations then for now i'll just reflect on what i think i could have done better being a merged rule set i wasn't allowed to use store-bought vitamins and i think that this impacted the yellow play-through more than it impacted the blue play-through because i had to do so much training earlier on to get past koga and the sylph rival if i was able to buy extra carbos they would have helped a lot as another optimization i think that spending time training against every trainer in victory road would have been a better use of my time than resetting against the champion if i had gotten it around five to seven levels higher in combination with carbos this might have let me out speed the alakazam just barely i would have actually needed 20 more speed to do that if i'm able to make the champions first three pokemon consistent then the magneton and the vaporeon being a bit inconsistent matters much less but how much time would it cost to get these extra levels well to quote a bad movie that's a good question for another time thanks to van man for participating in this video it was so much fun racing against a friend like subscribe ring the chime echo and leave a comment over on his channel it would totally make my day if all of you could double his sub count and i know that you can do it because you're incredible finally check out our knit around mail race link is in the description alright so i have no bloopers today so i'm gonna do something a little bit different i want to just say first of all that this knit around female playthrough was actually the second race that we did we started with nidoran mail so all of my really flavorful like first attempt bad plays are gonna be over on van man's channel go check it out there's some funny stuff for a bit of an update on some of the videos that i have promised in the past i'm going to stop promising videos by the way because it takes way longer to make them than i expect i started working on arcanine versus nine tails immediately after uh ho vs lugia i thought it was going to come out late april it's it's not it's not ready yet i've done like uh too many playthroughs too many playthroughs and then i kind of stalled uh but i'm gonna get work going on it again and hopefully that will be out by the end of the summer but i'm not making any promises it's going to be done when it's done another announcement that i have which is really exciting is that with game hook the developer has been able to solve a problem that we were facing with gen 3 games so now in gen 3 i will be able to do all of the live stat updates and moveset updates that i am doing in both generation 1 and generation 2. so more gen 3 content will be coming to the channel soon as well as a 40 000 subscriber q a video it's been filmed for like a month but i uh i just like uh haven't had the time to be able to produce it these videos take a long time to make by the way it's gonna be a pokemon emerald run with jirachi only something i should mention about generation three and why the swampert video is so late like i wanted to finish that video in march by the way i wanted to do um sceptile in january blaziken in february and then swampert in march but it's still not done i have filmed a swampert playthrough but basically where i'm at is i haven't learned those games well enough like i don't know them on the level that i know generation 1 or generation 2. so doing repeated playthroughs just doesn't feel very good yet because i'm not able to optimize as much as i would like to and then it feels like the video is still incomplete even if i do two or three playthroughs so that's why i've delayed the swampert video because i haven't really been sure how to manage generation three do i continue with my same format or do i switch the format what i'm going to end up implementing is that i'm only going to be doing single playthroughs in generation 3 at least now in the future i may start doing multiple playthroughs like i did in generation 1 and 2. i just need to give myself time to learn the games in a slightly less pressured environment where i'm not so focused on optimization after all you're all gonna comment a ton of things and this is gonna be helpful for me to learn the games so thanks so much i really appreciate it all of you are contributing so much to this content it means the world to me i've got no more updates so that's it you're incredible i'll see you in my next video

Channel: Scott's Thoughts

Views: 116,062

Keywords: Pokemon Challenge, Pokemon Yellow

Id: TNNncSdWzig

Length: 83min 16sec (4996 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 14 2022