Pokémon Diamond Hardcore Nuzlocke - Fire Type Pokémon Only! (No items, No overleveling)

hi everyone my name is flygon hg and this is the video of my attempt at a hardcore nuzlocke of pokemon diamond using only fire type pokemon to see what i define as hardcore nuzlocke rules check out the description below but in short no items in battle no over leveling past the gym leader's ace and we're playing on set mode so it's finally here the much requested incredibly difficult meme run of a sinnoh fire type only run now for those of you who have never played a sinnoh game before let's break down why this monolock is so ridiculously difficult while fire types are pretty rare in most games the sinnoh pokedex takes this to the extreme resulting in a grand total of just six fire type pokemon before the elite four that means that wait this this is the set of encounters for platinum and we're doing this challenge on diamond so we lose a few encounters let me just get rid of those and here we are yeah the fire type encounters in pokemon diamond are this monkey and this skinny cow that's it two encounters for the entire game fortunately both infernape and rapidash are fast pokemon but i'm gonna level with you this challenge was incredibly difficult for the sake of time i won't be touching on every single thing that i had to consider when dealing with this challenge chief among them being experience management so that i didn't over level but if you are interested seek out the full videos of the entire playthrough on twitch where i meticulously break down every issue that comes up also we now have a discord channel find the link in the description to join the flag on community you can discuss nuzlocking make recommendations for future challenges and more anyways i plugged my twitch i plugged my discord is there anything else that i want to plug here right this video's sponsor this video is sponsored by surfsharkvpn surfsharkvpn is a virtual private network that creates a protected virtual connection when you are connected to the internet this encrypts your internet 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surfsharkvpn is that sharks are cool did you know that 83 of children who become fascinated by an aquatic animal become fascinated by sharks did you know that 50 of weather-obsessed crime bosses prefer sharks over camels children and team aqua approve so try it out by using the link in the description and the promo code flygon hg for 83 off safe secure shark based web browsing and streaming thanks so much to surfsharkvpn for sponsoring this video so now let's get into it just as a quick reminder before we start i play with species claws so i'll be able to reroll encounters until i get a unique encounter but i can only use one of each unique evolution line so i won't be using five rapidash okay let's see how it goes as you may have guessed i start the challenge by picking chimchar as my starter i named chimchar monkey and our journey begins we can't get ponyta until we get to eterna city so our next stop is the first gym leader but first we're challenged by our rival rival our rival can be kind of difficult since he chose a piplup but in this first fight the piplup never uses bubble so it's pretty easy after taking out the starly we just straight off scratches and pounds until we're victorious just kidding we lose because piplup gets a critical hit pound that was fun okay so we take another crack at rival rival in attempt 2 and things go better starly goes down to two embers and then piplup goes down to a handful of scratches and embers thanks to blaze activating at the end with that we can move on to rourke now rourke can be very difficult to deal with fortunately the level cap for rorke is 14 and for whatever reason monkey can evolve into monferno at level 14. so this gives him access to mock punch which gives him a fighting type stab move to hit rork's rock types with however there's actually an even easier play here in diamond and pearl you can get the tm for hidden power from the trainer school in jubalife which is a special move with a random type and random power based on your pokemon's ivs or their individual values we'll talk about ivs more later but for now just know that it means that monkey has a hidden power water type with around 50 base power and since roark's pokemon are very weak to special moves and since both geodude and onyx are times four weak to water monkey is able to sweep through rorke's entire team without much of a problem and that's badge number one before heading to the second gym we need to face commander mars from team galactic definitely not team plasma i know the difference there's a bunch of commander fights throughout this game and i'm only going to touch on the ones that are notably difficult going forward despite mars hideously disfigured cat this one isn't one of the ones that's particularly difficult since mockpunch makes relatively quick work of it and after that we get to turn a city so we can now catch our second and final team member a ponyta from route 211 i name her cow and with our ultra powerful tag team we can take care of gardenia no problem and by tag team i mean flame wheels from monkeys sweep through gardenia's entire team as cow cheers from the sidelines after the battle gardenia gives us the tm for grass knot which will be incredibly valuable later on before continuing with the gym campaign though we need to fight commander jupiter she has a scun tank and that's a little scary but we'll be fine cow knocks out the zubat with two stomps and then the skunk tank comes out and i use a tail whip to lower its defense i also use a growl to lower the skuntank's attack before switching into monkey and taking it out just kidding skunk tank gets a critical hit night slash bypassing the stat drops and killing cal monkey is able to come in and take care of this gun tank but it's way too early in the run to lose cow so i think it's time for a reset somewhere around this point is when i start debating whether it's actually worth it to keep using species claws if i was playing without the species claws i could catch five different ponyta which would give me some wiggle room and some sacrificial lambs or sacrificial cows i guess it'd be kind of embarrassing if i messed up farm animals like that anyways at least for now i decide to keep trying with species claws active but maybe we'll reassess this if this becomes impossible attempt 3 starts off pretty much the same way my hidden power type is fighting this time around so rorke is a pretty easy sweep we catch a new cow this time he's male and then after burning gardenia's place of work down to the ground it's jupiter round two this time i decide to lead with monkey i thought a flame wheel would one shot the zubat but it doesn't i get lucky though and zubat gets burned meaning that the wing attack that she uses doesn't do much damage this gun tank is out next and despite some accuracy drops from smoke screen we get lucky and none of monkey's flame wheels miss i switched to cow at the very end and a stomp takes out the scun tank winning us the battle now that that's over we're facing an incredibly difficult part of this challenge in diamond and pearl the third and fourth gym leaders are meleeing in veilstone city and crasher wake in pastoria city respectively both may lean and crash awake have level caps of 30 which means that i need to beat both of these gym leaders without going over the level cap this means that for one of these gyms i'll need to be under level now fortunately you can access both veilstone city and pastoria city at any time and in any order this means that i can go to both gyms and clear through all the mandatory trainers along the way so that i can essentially take on may lean and crash awake back to back and this is pretty necessary because meilene has a machoke and a lucario that we will definitely need to one shot and crasher wake has all water types including a gyarados so this is going to take a great deal of preparation but we have a few resources at our disposal the first is that i get access to the underground this is important for a few reasons one it gives me access to a bunch of cool items like a heat rock which will extend the length of sun from sunny day which is a tm that i pick up and teach to cow the underground also gives me access to virtually unlimited money by mining for items and with enough patience i'm able to sell items i find in the underground for money without having to challenge trainers over and over again this means that unlimited money is not tied to experience points it just requires a lot of patience with unlimited money i'm also able to purchase unlimited coins at the veilstone game corner where i can pick up incredibly useful tms like sword stance and flamethrower i'm also able to purchase tms like solar beam and natural gift from the veilstone department store as well as stat boosting items like proteins and irons all of this gives us at least a fighting chance against maylene and crash awake but there's one more important resource to tap in sinnoh there are two people who give you berries once a day first is the berry master on route 208 who will randomly give you one of the berries numbered 1 to 30. this includes the common berries like the citrus berry cherry berry orenberry it also includes these stat lowering berries like the palm egg berry and then a handful of random other berries like the wepperberry that is primarily used to make poffins second a woman in pastoria city will randomly give you one of these super effective resist berries so for example a pastural berry will reduce the damage of a super effective water type attack by half so by changing the date on my computer i i mean my nintendo ds i can theoretically get an unlimited supply of these berries as long as i have enough patience to do so but i don't have patience that's why i'm on youtube in the interest of making videos at a relatively consistent rate and not having my twitch streams just be hours of this [Music] i decide to take matters into my own hands and speed up the process through the use of pk hex but as a reminder i'm only doing this to get items that are legally capable of being farmed at this point in the game anyways the only thing that this is doing is cutting away hours and hours of grinding to make for more entertaining content my conscience is clear so hopefully you can live with this too if not let me know in the comments you know youtube algorithms and such anyways let's get back to the actual gameplay shall we after clearing through all the trainers we take on meilin first up is a meta type a lead monkey who sets up a sword stance as meditate uses a drain punch unfortunately i need another sword stance here to guarantee a kill on the machoke in the back so i have to risk a crit but i'm unpunished as meditate just goes for a meditate a flame wheel kills the meditate and then lucario comes out but thanks to its steel typing a flame wheel is enough for a one shot as we just outspeed it thanks to some speed evs last is macho but monkey is holding a koba berry which halves damage from a super effective flying move but more importantly it means that we can use natural gift natural gift is a physical move that changes type and base power based on the barrier that the user is holding with a koba berry this gives us a one time 60 base power flying type move that is able to knock out the machok in one shot that's meleen defeated immediately after that we make our way to pastoria city and take on crasher wake crash awake is an absolute beast thanks to his gyarados which will lower my attack at the start of the battle with intimidate so even a natural gift electric type move won't kill the gyarados with -1 attack there's also the float cell in the back that we need to out speed and take out quickly so we'll need to be pretty creative and unfortunately we will need to dodge a critter too i lead cow into the gyarados to eat the intimidate i then use natural gift which is based off of a weber berry which gives cow a 7d base power electric type attack this does decent damage into gyarados as it goes for a bite as a note here it makes zero sense for gyarados to go for bite brian does more damage so does dragon rage the ai in diamond and pearl is really dumb which is great because it means that the ai usually doesn't go for the optimal play but the thing about dumb ai is that it's also unpredictable which means that it's incredibly difficult to predict what it's going to do making it impossible to plan around every single possibility more on that later though on the next turn i switch to monkey and unfortunately gyarados goes for a super potion here which wasn't part of the plan but it should be okay i go for a sword stance as gyarados goes for a dragon rage i've made sure to ev monkey so that he won't go down to two dragon rages which always does 40 damage i hit a grass knot for a chunk of damage as gyarados goes for a brine this leaves monkey with three hp so obviously i was at a risk to a crit here but there was nothing that i could really do about that but now that i'm at low health blaze is active and thanks to the plus two attack from sword stance flamewheel takes out the gyarados next up is quagsire but the chunky boy goes down to a single grass knot and then third is floatsil but we have another wepperberry prepared for that so a natural gift takes it out in one shot winning us the fourth gym badge with that massive obstacle out of the way we get a little bit of a break in terms of difficulty first off our level cap jumps all the way up to level 36 so monkey is able to evolve into internet which by the way is a really dumb name infernape is clearly not an ape it's a monkey it has a tail anyways after that it's time to take on fantino but compared to crash awake she should be a total breeze her driftloom poses a slight problem because it likes to use minimize and its ability aftermath does a sizeable chunk of damage if i kill it with a move that makes contact but monkey should have enough power to be able to take care of it without too much trouble so i start with a sword stance as blim goes for a minimize i then go for a second sword stance as driplimb just uses astonish another example of the dpai being absolute garbage next i go for a flame wheel which misses and then drift flume hits an ominous wind and the 10 omni boost activates giving it plus one to all of its stats that's that's really bad not the end of the run but now i do need to play carefully and get lucky so the first thing i have to do is hit a flame wheel so i go for a flame wheel okay okay now it's over drift blim hits a gust bringing monkey into blaze range but thanks to the omni boost a flamethrower even in blaze won't kill and if i kill with flame flamewheel driftblim's aftermath will kill me in return my one play is to get a critical hit with flamethrower i managed to hit the flamethrower but it doesn't crit so monkey goes down cow is able to come out and take out the drift blim but even if he can somehow beat the rest of fantina's team which he doesn't this run is dead without monkey that was terrible terrible luck i had a zoom lens to up my accuracy but even then i managed to miss two attacks and the drifblim got that plus one omni boost really unideal but i know i can play that fight better so let's take it from the top in attempt 4 monkey has a really bad hidden power type i want to say it's poison type but i don't actually remember either way it means we have to use mock punch to get through rork which is borderline impossible mack punch doesn't even two-shot the geodude and we take way too much damage from rock throw i try to induce a burn with ember since it does similar damage anyways but that doesn't end up working we are able to take out the geodude and the onyx is hot garbage so it can't knock us out either but kranidos is able to finish the job with a bit of luck or a slightly stronger monferno i guess this is technically possible but this is an important thing to keep in mind when evaluating whether a specific challenge run is actually possible or not sometimes the first gym leader is a complete brick wall to what seems like an otherwise really exciting challenge rourke is especially difficult because he has two physical walls and a hard-hitting ace so if you can't get access to a special move before level 14 you're usually pretty screwed this is particularly problematic in platinum where hidden power has been removed from the trainer school in jubalife city so it actually prevents a surprising amount of challenges without just insane amounts of luck or some rule change for the first gym anyways on the very next attempt monkey gets hidden power fighting again so it's all good we're able to sweep through roark on attempt 5 and then move on with our lives we also of course catch cow and then we plow through gardenia's grass types however because of new monkey and new cows different ivs eevees nature etc etc their stats are a little different and so the plan that i had for maylene and crasher wake in attempt 3 won't work here so here's what i worked out instead i lead cow into meleen's meditate and set up a sunny day as she goes for a drain punch then i switch to monkey who gets hit by a confusion even if that confusion crit we would be fine and monkey is also holding a person berry in case of confusion from here three flame throwers boosted by sun knock out meleen's entire team barring meditate using meditate and then getting a critical hit drain punch that plan was foolproof the plan for wake is a little less foolproof unfortunately monkey doesn't have a high enough attack stat this time to be able to reliably knock out floatzolt even after his sword stance so i have to bet on cow i lead monkey into crasher wakes gyarados to eat up the attack drop from intimidate monkey also has an iron ball equipped which quarters his speed this allows monkey to use u-turn after gyarados is attacked to switch into cow without cow taking any damage this is a bit dangerous because it risks a critical hit brine a flinch from bite or swagger but thankfully we pull it off and cow comes in with neutral stats next i need to set up a sunny day which puts us at risk to a swagger but gyarados just goes for a bite again then a wepperberry boosted natural gift kills the gyarados which gets us another level and enough speed points to outspeed the floatzole quagsire comes out second and goes down to a solar beam which is now a single turn move because of the sun and last is floatzel who goes down to a single solar beam as well did i just sweep through crasher wake's water type gym with a ponyta yes yes i did next up is round two against fantina i've revised the strategy to make it a little more to our advantage but it's still not flawless i start with swords dance and driftblim goes for the ominous wind there's half a second of absolute fear that it'll get another omni boost but thankfully it doesn't i go for another sword stance and gust hits hard but a citrus berry heals enough health that i'm not in range of aftermath so a flame wheel takes out the drift blim the miss maggious and the gengar in the back also go down to two flame wheels winning us the fifth gym badge and getting us our furthest attempt yet ultimately though this still wasn't the best game plan because a lot of things still could have gone wrong we had aerial ace to play around minimize which would have killed after two sword stances but a critical hit from gust or a boost from ominous wind would have definitely ended the run again the unreliability of ai is a really big pain anyways our next stop is cantalave city to fight rorke's dad byron we do get stopped by our rival rival here and i know i've been skipping all the rival fights but it's because he's really underwhelming in diamond and pearl for example during this specific fight in platinum he has a star raptor but here it's just a star avia rival rival also consistently makes really terrible move choices so he's never much of a problem even in the final battle against rival rival before the elite four his star raptor doesn't know brave bird and diamond and pearl so it's super easy we're just gonna ignore these battles from here on out as i was saying byron this should be super easy because byron has steel types however because we had to get rid of close combat for the fight with fantina we don't actually have it here since infernape doesn't actually learn close combat until level 41. this isn't a problem against the bronze orb since it goes down to a flamethrower but it does mean that we need to rely on hidden power fighting for the bastiodon which isn't enough for a one shot but bastion just retaliates with an ancient power which even if it got the omni boost and it crit it wouldn't matter last is selix and it goes down to a flamethrower too getting us an easy sixth gym badge with our new level cap at 42 cow is finally now able to evolve into his beautiful final form a rapidash with that we have our final elite four team but can we even get there there's a bunch of team galactic stuff that we have to do here now but we can skip it since it's all really easy we eventually get to snow point city where it's time to take on candace and her ice types naturally this is pretty easy with flamethrowers just ripping through her first three pokemon metacham is fourth and actually holds on from a flamethrower and retaliates with a force palm that actually would have killed me if it crit so that was pretty reckless and i should have been planning around that i lucked out there's a lot of ways that i definitely could have played that battle safer but i didn't really think too hard about it because i was so preoccupied by what comes next which is easily the biggest challenge of the run so far but before we break that down i want to talk briefly about ivs or individual values in my previous videos i've talked a bit about evs or effort values which are points to stats that your pokemon gain from defeating other pokemon so essentially you have complete control over the eevees of your pokemon ivs on the other hand are individual values assigned to your pokemon each pokemon has an iv for each of the six stats and each iv can range from 0 to 31 pokemon with 31 ivs will have better stats than pokemon with zero ivs assuming all else between the pokemon is equal so basically certain pokemon are just inherently better than others when you catch a pokemon its ivs are generated at random for the most part and these ivs cannot be changed at least not in generation iv so when i received monkey his ivs at the start stay the same throughout the rest of the playthrough and these ivs in addition to his nature and his evs of course determine the stats that he'll have at any given level which in turn determines how much damage he does to other pokemon and how much damage he receives from other attacks so what are monkeys ivs well in game it's pretty much impossible to tell what your pokemon's ivs are if you monitor your evs you can use online iv calculators to get a good estimate based on the stats at any given level but we can actually just check the exact ivs and evs of any pokemon using pk hex the results not great while monkey does have a 30 special attack id which is great and his defenses are average to good his three remaining stats are pretty piss-poor most notably and most importantly he has an attack iv of two which is really truly terrible now for the most part even during challenge runs mediocre ivs aren't a huge deal it's really only in fringe cases where this actually makes a significant difference so generally you don't really need to worry too much about ivs during a nuzlocke but in a run where there's only two pokemon to tackle every single problem that you face fringe cases are a lot more common and our next challenge just so happens to be one of those cases up next we have to save the world by stopping team galactic at spear pillar as is usually the case with world ending conflicts this is resolved with pokemon battles specifically two pokemon battles back to back the first is a double battle against galactic commanders mars and jupiter with rival rival as my partner the battle isn't particularly difficult on the surface but because rival rival leads with a munchlax he can oftentimes just be pretty much dead weight on top of that after beating mars and jupiter you're immediately challenged by cyrus rival rival does heal your pokemon but it means that you can't switch up the order of your team your held items or your moveset so everything used for the mars and jupiter fight has to also be optimized for the cyrus fight which is an incredibly specific and difficult challenge cyrus has four pokemon all of which can do a ton of damage to monkey and cow cow isn't strong enough to handle this fight on his own and switching between pokemon is too risky so it's essentially up to monkey to solo cyrus but there's a lot of problems first he leads with a haunch crow that knows drill peck a critical hit from that haunts crow will instantly kill monkey there is nothing i can do about that unless i hold a koba berry to reduce the damage from a super effective flying type move he also has a gyarados though that knows earthquake and aqua tail which can one shot monkey so we need to be able to kill the gyarados in one shot unfortunately as we already know that's very difficult to do since gyarados has intimidate which lowers our attack and the only reliable way to one shot the gyarados is with a natural gift electric berry on top of that there's also a crowbat which can do a lot of damage with cross poison or air slash and a weavile which can do a lot of damage with brick brake plus probate and weavile are super fast so we'll need a ton of speed investments to out speed them so how are we going to do this well the plan is to set up a sword stance on haunch crow if the haunch crow doesn't crit a drill pack or monkey is holding a coba berry monkey will be able to survive and have enough boosts to be able to one shot the gyarados and the crobat with one specific move rock slide at plus one attack rockslide will kill gyarados and crobat but there is a catch rockslide has 90 accuracy which means if we miss rockslide on any of these pokemon they'll retaliate with a kill there is one way around this though by having monkey hold a wide lens we can increase the accuracy of rock slide to 99 percent making it much more likely that we don't miss an attack but there's another problem remember how i said that monkey had an attack iv of two well because of that and his neutral nature even if we have max attack evs monkey is not guaranteed to kill gyarados or crobat with rockslide in pokemon there is a factor of randomness added to every damage calculation such that any given attack has a range of damages that can be given so while rockslide can kill these pokemon monkeys attack iv is so bad that there are a few of these lower damage rolls that will actually leave both of those pokemon with a sliver so to avoid this we actually need to give monkey a hard stone which will boost his rock type attacks guaranteeing the kill on gyarados and crobat if we hit there's really nothing we can do about this we can't cover all our bases so we need to risk a crit from drill pack and risk several misses this is easily the most stressed i've ever been for any battle in any challenge that i've done so far but first we need to beat mars and jupiter with rival rival they start the battle with their two bronzer i've taught monkey flame wheel so i can take out commander mars as bronzor as munchlax hits a body slam on the other per ugly comes out next so i target it to force a two on one and fortunately rival has the same idea because he hits perugli with a body slam that paralyzes it good job rival on the next turn i decide to be a little greedy here and go for a sword stance per ugly and bronzer double up on monkey as rival just uses stockpile right after i complimented you rival really anyways on the next turn i take out the parugli with a flame wheel and then bronzor hits an extra sensory as rival just uses swallow with that extra sensory damage monkey is looking pretty low so i have to switch out to cow then i go for a protect to see if rival will do some damage but munchlax goes down so i set up a sunny day as rival's ponyta goes for a willow wisp on the next turn flamethrower takes care of the golbat and fireblast from ponyta takes care of the bronzor mars and jupiter are powerless against cow and baby cow golbat is next but a flamethrower plus burn damage takes it out and then lasts his skuntank we hit it hard with flamethrower but it hangs on with the sliver and retaliates with a poison job that actually would have killed if it crit but luckily it didn't so we win the battle with one more flamethrower you know rival rival was actually not completely useless i'm proud of him now it's cyrus time i know it has to be done and there's not much to do but pray that luck is on our side cyrus leads haunts crow and i go for sword stance and then the idiot ai goes for a dark pulse so i suppose that's nice it means that it didn't see the crit with drill peck now unfortunately because we needed flame wheel for the fight with mars and jupiter we didn't have space for close combat so i do need to risk a rock slide miss here so i click rock slide and it connects one down two to go gyarados comes out and rock slide connects again next is crobat but even if we miss our rock slide here it actually does need a critical hit with air slash or cross poison to knock us out but we don't even miss that is three for three rock slides and after knocking out weevil with a flame wheel that cyrus defeated what an absolute relief but now we've just jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire because it's now time to fight dialga and since dawn won't let us leave i can't teach monkey close combat so we don't have a reliable way to one shot it this is terrifying since roar of time can one shot monkey and cow fortunately dialga is a wild pokemon and wild pokemon use moves randomly so if it doesn't use roar of time we might be able to stand a chance so we slowly approach dialga and prepare for a terrifying battle with the god of time from here it's a straight shot to vulchner although we do run into this sorry excuse for a fire type trainer seriously flint a low punny a drift blim a stelix you make me sick experience management is absolutely terrifying here because we do get really close to over leveling as a result of all the mandatory battles in volkner's gym but it works out and once we get to volkner a sword stance from monkey followed by four close combats is enough to kill all of vulchner's electric types also we were holding a cherry berry in case static activated on raichu so this battle was literally unlosable with that our next stop is the elite four so after clearing through victory road destroying rival rival one last time and getting to the level cap and also doing hours of preparation we're ready to take on the elite four with a monkey and a cow here's our final team let's see if we've got what it takes [Music] there's a few elite four members that will require some pretty risky strategies and i'll make sure to explain them before we try them each time but aaron the bug type elite four member is not one of those people i start the battle with monkey in blaze range so that his fire type attacks are boosted i also give him a choice specs and then flamethrowers incinerate every single one of aaron's team members even the drapion in the back and that's an easy first victory so next up is bertha but the strategy for bertha is almost completely foolproof she leads with a quagsire here's its move set if you notice her only damaging move is dig so by teaching protect to monkey i can avoid any damage from quagsire other than sandstorm chip this allows me to safely set up the two combines necessary for grass knots to sweep through bertha's entire team the one problem is that quagsire could spam double team and with incredibly terrible luck i could miss enough grass knots that sandstorm chip takes me out or i run out of pp but that would be insanely unlucky like less than one percent chance of happening no one is that unlucky so bertha leads quagsire and i start setting up combines and bertha just throws the game by making the stupefying decision to go for double protects as i set up comb lines so the grass not hits on the next turn and then grass nut sweeps through the rest of bertha's team well almost sudobuto is last and it hangs onto grassnot i completely forgot that sandstorm buffs the special defense of rock types that's a mistake on my part but fortunately it's an okay one to make here because sudo wudo doesn't know a ground type move so even with a crit i would have been fine since i have a citrus berry on monkey so that would even prevent the sandstorm chip from taking me out anyways it was a little sloppy but that's bertha defeated next is the fake fire type trainer flint and this is actually a bit tricky we need to set up a sword stance with monkey but the rapidash knows bounce so if it uses bounce and it either crits or paralyzes me i'm actually in a bit of trouble unfortunately i can't hold a cherry berry or a coba berry for either of those two scenarios because we need a colbert berry so that we're able to take care of the drift blim in the back so i teach monkey dig that way if the rapidash uses bounce on the first turn i can use dig on the second turn to avoid it unfortunately because the dpai is so dumb and unpredictable that's not really guaranteed it could also just go for a flare blitz and if that flare blitz crits then i'm in trouble because flint's infernape knows mock punch which is priority and it could then kill me with a priority mock punch if that mock punch crits so this is kind of a risky battle on the first turn i go for a sword stance and i pray for anything but flare blitz but that is what the dpai decides to do so that sucks fortunately it's not a crit so it's not the end of the world i can't use dig here though because if rapidash uses bounce then i lose so i have to go for close combat which lowers my defense in special defense by one stage fortunately with the hp that i'm at a mock punch from infernape won't kill me even with the defense drop even if it crits and infernape should be coming out next because it's the only one of flint's pokemon that has a super effective move into monkey but for some reason low punny comes out presumably because it knows mirror coat which is coded as a psychic type attack and the ai reads that as super effective against monkey that's dumb and unfortunately this low pony is surprisingly bulky so a dig won't kill it so i have to use close combat to knock it out which again lowers my defenses this means that mock punch from infernape will now kill if it crits so the infant ape comes out and on the next turn it goes for mack punch but thankfully it doesn't crit and we're able to retaliate with a close combat of our own knocking it out next is selix which goes down to a close combat and then last is the drift blim who goes down to the cobra berry boosted natural gift flint and his fake fire types are defeated the last elite four member is lucian and now here's where things get tricky lucian leads mr mime sometimes it'll just try and set up screens we need to set up a swords dance with monkey to successfully knock everything else out in the back shadow claw will take care of the mr mime the alakazam and the medi-champ and close combat will take care of the giraffe rig and the bronzong but if mr mime sets up a reflect then we need to set up two swords dances and stall out the reflect with a few protects before the bronzong comes in but unfortunately the mr mime might not go for screens it might just go for a psychic in that case we need to be able to survive a psychic we can actually change the evs that monkey has by using some evie berries and some vitamins to take monkeys defense evs and put them into special defense this will make it so that mr mime can never one-shot monkey with psychic so long as it doesn't crit we can also play around the crit by giving monkey a piopa berry to reduce the damage of a psychic type move which makes this a guaranteed win but because of monkey's pesky attack iv of 2 plus 2 close combat doesn't always kill the bronzong it actually has an 87.5 percent chance to one shot and if it doesn't one shot the bronzong will likely retaliate with a psychic or an earthquake for the kill i can guarantee a kill on the bronzong with a fist plate to boost monkey's fighting type moves but then we're at risk to a crit from mr mine ultimately i choose to go with the fist plate since 6.25 chance of a crit is lower than 12.5 chance of missing the kill with close combat either way there is a chance we lose the run here so lucian leads mr mine and we set up a sword stance and then mr mime sets up a light screen literally the best case scenario so from here monkey sweeps through the rest of lucian's team taking no damage thank you crappy dp ai with that we've beaten the elite four and i am feeling great the final obstacle of the challenge is cynthia she's tough for sure but she's significantly easier in diamond and pearl than she is in platinum and i actually have a really great strategy planned out for this thanks to the fact that monkey single-handedly took care of the elite four on his own he's gained a bunch of levels which means that he can out-speed the guard chomp so with a pomeg berry equipped we can make natural gift a 7d base power ice type move at plus two attack that will one shot the garchomp a plus two close combat will also kill cynthia's gastrodon mylodic and lucario and a plus two earthquake will kill the rosary so that just leaves the spirit tomb which knows psychic we can tweak monkeys evs a little bit here by dropping our attack down from 252 evs to 100 evs with the use of a single kelpsie berry then we can use the leftover eevees to give us some more hp and some more special defense evs so that psychic will never kill monkey even if it crits unfortunately a plus 2 earthquake won't kill the spirit tomb from full health so if spirit tomb gets a crit with either psychic then it's game over the way around this is to bring cow off the bench by leading cow we can do enough damage to spirit tune with solar beam to guarantee a kill with an earthquake from monkey i've decided to use solar beam because even if the solar beam crits it won't kill spirozoom after that though it means that we need to sacrifice cow to get a free switch into monkey but cow's sacrifice will give us a guaranteed win so we prep cow for the slaughter and we give him a heart scale to show just how much we love him and then we step into cynthia's chambers the music starts and our battle begins she leads spirit tomb and cow starts with the solar beam spear tomb goes for a dark pulse and then cow hits her with solar beam doing the damage needed for monkey to get the kill with a plus two earthquake but then spirit tomb goes for a silver wind and she gets the omni boost this sucks because it means that earthquake won't kill from this range it also means that a critical hit from spirit tomb will now kill monkey so suddenly victory is no longer guaranteed but it's still really heavily in our favor we need to go for a flamethrower to get a little more damage on spirit tomb but if it burns or crits then we're in trouble because spirit tomb will faint or it'll just heal luckily the flamethrower does neither and spear tomb goes for a dark pulse leaving cow with 4 hp on the next turn i use a sunny day so as not to damage the spirit doom anymore and cow goes down to a silver wind while this silver wind doesn't trigger another omni boost it does get a crit so this spirit tomb is kind of on fire thank you for your sacrifice kyle but you've now set up monkey for the victory all we need to do is dodge one more crit as we set up a sword stance [Music] i'm at a loss for words even as i write this script re-watching the gameplay it's unbelievable really just terrible terrible luck the chances of losing this battle this way are 10 for the omni boost from silver wind times 6.25 for the critical hit for a nice healthy 0.625 chance that's pretty soul-crushing but admittedly 0.625 percent is a little misleading because it is ignoring all the chances that this run could have wiped well ahead of time i could have missed rock slides against cyrus i could have been cripped by crasher wake fantina candice mars and jupiter or any number of other random trainer battles that i didn't show where i was accidentally playing sub-optimally the fact of the matter is that in a run like this where you can't have a single death every battle matters and the tiny chances here and there will all eventually add up so it's honestly surprising that i was even able to make it as far as i did does that make it feel any better to wipe to the champion no 0.625 chance is still really low but i am incredibly proud of myself for getting to this point and this challenge was so much fun i've never had to use so many fringe strategies and i've never felt more excited than when i was able to finally crack a strategy that i thought was impossible that being said this still really sucks and i'm definitely not going to be retrying this challenge any time soon i think i've proven that the challenge is possible in fact we can try it one more time after the wipe just to see what would happen and hilariously on this second attempt the spirit tomb still does get an omni boost off actually it gets two omni boosts off i have no idea what cynthia is feeding her spirit tomb but sign me up for whatever it is despite the two omni boosts though on this next attempt the spirit tomb doesn't get the critical hit with psychic and were able to sweep through cynthia's team exactly as expected so can a hardcore nuzlocke of diamond with fire types only be completed yes can i complete a hardcore nuzlocke of diamond with fire types only no at least not at this time and somehow i'll have to be okay with that but nuzlockes are failed all the time even by the best nuzlockers so that's pokemon for you i'm sure i'll attempt this again someday but for now it's time to move on to another challenge as an educational point let's just look at one last thing before we go a user in my twitch chat pointed out that had cow known captivate instead of sunny day i would have won this battle captivate is a move that lowers the special attack of a pokemon of the opposite gender by two stages had i done this instead of use sunny day on this third turn here then the spirit tomb would be at -1 special attack and a critical hit would result in neutral damage never resulting in a kill on monkey of course this strategy isn't flawless either because it does require cow to survive a follow-up attack from the spirit tomb which isn't always guaranteed and we can't go for captivate before flamethrower because that additional damage is still needed on monkey to make sure that we can get the kill with earthquake so while captivate still doesn't always guarantee a win it would have been a good contingency plan for me to have but again playing around that .625 percent chance isn't always easy to remember to do especially since using a bug type move against my fire type pokemon seems like something that the ai shouldn't and wouldn't do regardless lesson learned and i'm a better nuzlocker for it anyways thank you all so much for watching this video and for all your continued support if you enjoyed watching please like the video and subscribe for more challenges just like this be sure to follow me on twitter and twitch to keep up with streams of my future challenges and you can now join the flag on hg community discord server we'd love to have you there so come and join the conversation until then remember to always always always always play around the critical hit you

Channel: FlygonHG

Views: 778,357

Keywords: Pokemon, Pokemon Diamond, Nuzlocke, Pokemon Challenges, Fire Type Pokemon

Id: _lsn3VsGoac

Length: 42min 44sec (2564 seconds)

Published: Sat May 01 2021