[Music] hi Pokemon at its core is about friendship and how working together leads to personal growth Pokemon become the strongest version of themselves through your guidance and you as a trainer find purpose through achieving your successes and goals it's a beautiful metaphor for life and it makes me realize that I can take advantage of these suckers everyone's so focused on catching them all or becoming the champion but nobody realizes that there's money to be made here baby so why started up a new game in the Kanto region with one goal collect the most money I'm legally able to get let's become pokem [Music] millionaires as you know every Mainline Pokemon game has an in-game currency formally called poke dollars this basically exists to Aid you in your primary Quest allowing you to buy helpful items like Pokeballs and Potions however I'll be making the acquisition of money my PR primary Quest as I play through the game the decisions I make will be solely based on what gives me the most money in the end yeah yeah all this nonsense about Pokemon tell me about how I can make a profit here buddy money can be made in two main ways defeating Pokémon trainers and collecting and selling items however these methods are completely exploitable you could fight the same trainer over and over or you could generate infinite items to get infinite amounts of money that's so so not in the spirit of what I'm trying to do here so I need to set a few rules for this challenge first and foremost any repeatable way of making money is banned including things like using the pickup ability to get free items using wild Pokémon in any way like stealing items over and over or any repeatable items that pop up every so often basically if I could do that one thing and make infinite money it's banned this also includes re battling trainers using the versus Seeker I'm allowed to fight every trainer one time time and one time only with the exception of blue cuz that mother is everywhere so if I ignore those repeatable methods how much money will the game let me collect between the value of the items that I get and the straight up cash I win that's what I'm trying to find out with that in mind I start working my way through the game collecting any available items like this potion in my PC and fighting trainers like blue whose defeat Nets me a cool $80 although the starter I picked doesn't really matter I ended up going with bulbas s since it's great for handling Brock and Misty since after Cerulean we'll be switching to another Pokémon but we'll get to that in a bit whenever I enter a new area for the first time I'm looking to see what items I can collect and what trainers I can fight route one only has one item a potion from the vidiian PokeMart employee and no trainers to fight so I can grab Oak's parcel and return it to him where he gives me and my rival a few items most are key items which can't be sold and therefore have zero value value but he does give me five pokeballs so that's nice I continue on picking up every available item in vidiian city and Forest including a few hidden items and here we find the first real trainers of the game however fighting them now would be a huge mistake if we wait and come back to fight these trainers later we can actually get way more money from them so for now we just fight the one trainer required to progress Peter City contains the first gym leader Brock who is a mandatory fight to proceed there is an optional Gym trainer here too but there's a special reason why we don't skip him gym trainers do not uh remain active once you beat the gym leader so once I beat Brock I can't fight that person so it actually makes sense to just fight them now because it's completely lost money so I might as well get some money out of him Bulbasaur annihilates both trainers and Brock gives me $400 plus a TM worth $1,500 there's one other trainer who will be gone by the time I'm able to come back here as the second rival fight is inaccessible once you see him in Cerulean before we leave pwer our net worth is just under $5,000 but we're just getting started through route three Route 4 and mount Moon I collect every accessible item and fight only the required trainers caves are especially annoying since I don't want to spend money on anything let alone repels so I just have to suffer through a million wild po encounters Mount moon is where we find the first possibility of recurring items as there are mushrooms that have a chance to appear when you take a certain number of steps there are a bunch of items like this but since I could theoretically do this forever and make one trillion dollar none of these will be kept I continued this strategy through Cerulean taking out the two gym trainers and Misty thanks to Ivysaur the game won't let us progress past Cerulean and the only other thing we can do is pretend we can afford the bus bike so we need to go north and fight some more trainers with just our starter Pokémon the third rival fight is actually pretty tricky so I have to reset on a few attempts that go wrong another rule in this challenge is that I can reset to get the most optimal outcome this is an experiment to see how much money you could theoretically get so as long as it's possible we want the most favorable outcome I fight the mandatory Bridge trainers collect a few items and help bill with his teleportation machine although he doesn't pay me for my time which feels kind of unfair I should really start charging for billable hours or should I say billable hour now that I have access past Cerulean it's time for things to take a major turn now I have access to Route 5 down here on route five there is a uh very special Pokemon that I can catch that uh changes this whole run and there is our boy Meowth I want to use the least valuable resource I can to catch Meowth which is one Pokeball I may lose $100 by using this instead of selling it but trust me when I say that the profit I can get from Meowth is unmatched as you may know Meowth is a money hungry monster just like me in fact its fire red description reads all it does is sleep in the daytime at night it patrols its territory with its eyes a glow wait what it's leaf green description that's actually about money reads it adors round objects it wanders the streets on a nightly basis looking for dropped loose change and how exactly does a little old Meowth do that well at level 18 meow learns a Nifty little move called payday payday works like this every time the move is used a certain number of coins are scattered on the ground the amount is equal to your level Time 5 so if you're level 20 and you use use payday twice you'll receive $200 this is in addition to the money you get from winning battles but why be level 20 when instead okay so obviously I didn't just spend 8 hours grinding up a level 10 Meowth I'm not a crazy person but I could have by fighting wild Pokemon over and over and because it's possible I'm making it a rule that I can level up my Pokemon through cheats but not using Payday on wild Pokemon that would break this rule I get no extra money from this but I do have a level 100 Meowth now I'm sitting at $112,000 and every payday gets me500 so I could go back and fight all the trainers I missed however we have not reached our money-making potential yet so I keep going forward collecting items and fighting the one mandatory trainer on Route 6 we get 320 from beating the camper but we also pick up $1,000 and using the move twice and again it's legal because I'm not like grinding on the same trainer and collecting money I'm just going through the game and I just so happen to be using the move payday to do that I'm now required to board the SSN to get the HM for cut so I do that there's a bunch of trainers here but rather than skip most of them I actually fight every single one because once you get that hm the SSN leaves and those trainers are never to be seen again hope I didn't forget anything because the ability to use cut was gained by beating Misty's gym I have no requirement to fight Lieutenant surge now so I make my way through Route 9 and Route 10 to end up in the Rock Tunnel here we find lots of trainers with geodudes and onyx's which help illustrate a very critical decision that I made okay so this is why I didn't evolve meow because if I was Persian I would have definitely killed there right but because I'm Meowth I do less damage and that's like a higher chance for two hits and every time I use payday I get more money so it actually is in my benefit to not kill everything into Lavender Town my money now sits around $66,000 more than six times what I had when I caught Meowth the Kanto region truly opens up to me here and I can do any number of things I can collect items including paying for a few drinks to immediately turn a profit and picking up a free Eevee in the game corner I'm obviously not allowed to gamble since I could make infinite money from it oh but if you're a child watch watching this video you cannot make infinite money gambling however there are a bunch of coins on the ground that I can grab 300 to be exact I can trade these coins in for prizes but there's only one thing cheap enough that I can afford an Abra obviously Abra is not worth anything I can't sell it so the value it brings me is $0 my current goal is to get to fuchia City but there's a few things I need to do before I can get there the the first is rocket Hideout where I fight the mandatory Grunts and Giovani but things get interesting when I make it to the Pokémon Tower most of the trainers here have teams made up of Gastly this is a huge problem because payday is a normal type move and can't hit ghost Pokémon am I screwed these ghosts are making me re-evaluate my entire Financial life am I Scrooged so I could just use Fain attack kill them and just not get any money for it right but that's not what smart entrepreneurs think they think how can I how can I like get every last dollar out of here and there is a way to do it so let's go do it I'll use a second Pokeball to catch a wild Machop because at level 22 Machop learns foresight a move that allows ghosts to be hit by normal type moves so for the mandatory ghost trainers in the tower using foresight and switching in Meowth for the literal money shot sometimes the ghosts like to curse themselves to death before I can payday but I just retry these fights until I get the cash I need making it to the top of the tower Nets me the poke flute allowing me to move the Snorlax where we finally have access to a gamechanging item in the cycling road gate one of Professor Oak's AIDS holds the amulet coin an item that dramatically increases the money you can make from Pokémon battles unfortunately to get this item you need to have Pokédex entries for 40 caught Pokémon species and uh I'm not quite there the good news is catching 40 Pokémon is really easy the bad news is buying and using about 20 pokeballs is money I'd have to spend and I want to do everything in my power to not spend money if only there is a way I could get a bunch of free pokeballs H well it just so happens that in fuchsia City we can enter the Safari Zone an area that gives you you 30 pokeballs for free I guess it's technically not free since you do have to pay a $500 entrance fee but this is required to beat the game anyway since you get the surf and strength HMS here while I'm here I'm aiming to collect every item and catch every Pokémon available to me but I have to consider time as I'm only allowed to take 600 steps before my time is up luckily there's a trick I can use that fixes this issue by standing in place and spinning on the same tile I can trigger a wild Pokémon encounter and this doesn't actually use any steps so I can just spin around until I catch all the Pokémon in that part of the park so while I'm here I catch every single Pokémon available including all the fishing encounters it definitely took some resets as Pokémon do not like getting into Safari balls but eventually all the Safari own Pokémon are caught there's two items that I don't have access to right now but one of them is a nugget so spending the $500 to come back here is totally worth it by the time I finish collecting everything I only have 38 steps left so the tile spinning strategy is very necessary to complete everything in one trip okay let's do some quick math I had seven Pokémon before the Safari Zone in the Safari Zone itself I'm able to catch an additional 20 Pokémon some of these Pokémon can be evolved via level up and I can get six more Pokémon this way this gives me a total of 33 Pokémon seven short of my goal so how do I get these final seven Pokémon well there's a few NPCs throughout the game who will do in-game trades with you as long as you give them a specific Pokémon and thankfully most of these NPCs are looking for Safari Zone Pokémon on Route 18 someone will give me a lick a tongue for my slow bro in Cerulean someone will give me a jinx for a Poliwhirl and on Route 5 someone will give me the other nitan some of these Pokémon are also holding items so bonus money for me this is an additional four Pokémon bringing the total to 37 speaking speaking of nitan though you can get nid king and nid queen via evolving with a moonstone for some reason in gen 3 moonstones can't be sold so I might as well use them for Evolutions this gives us two more and brings us to 39 just one away from our goal we're so close but all of the ways to catch this last Pokémon seem to cost money I could use a Pokeball to catch literally anything or I could get one of the free Pokémon like Lapras or a hitmon but both of these would require fighting additional trainers fights that I could use the amulet coin on if I waited and make so much more money if only there is a way I could get this last Pokemon without spending any money H I can now spend my coins on the one thing I can afford at the Celadon game Corner Abra giving me enough Pokemon to get the amulet coin from Professor Oak's Aid and now the challenge goes full money mode The Amulet coin doubles the amount of money you receive from defeating a trainer but The Amulet coin also doubles the amount of money you get from payday that's a huge difference and it's why we waited to fight so many of these early game trainers so now with the amulet coin I go back through the entire game fighting every trainer I missed and collecting any items blocked by those trainers this includes fighting gyms 3 through six which were all not required to progress those gyms give me access to new areas through HMS so now I have access to almost every area in Mainland Kanto oh it's so nice I don't think I've ever I don't think I've ever seen Rock Tunnel with flash when I first equipped The Amulet coin I had about $93,000 by the time I went back and cleared out every trainer I had $992,500 Ong the water path but very quickly I realize I'm approaching a threshold that I need to be keenly aware of in Generation 3 the amount of money you can hold is capped and that cap is $999,999 if you have that much money and you gain additional money your total will still be that amount that money is essentially lost because the game has nowhere to store it I'm only $7,000 from this cap and I have a bunch of trainers left to fight so what do I do well I decided to take a page out of my namesake and billionaires like him because the ultra rich don't have their money in cash no no no no no no no most of their money is in Investments and that's what I need to do that's why I think of billionaires as ice types they're not very liquid oh yes absolutely nail what a perfect comedic blend of two different topics now don't let anybody know that you made this whole video just to tell that joke so to free up cash on hand I need to move my money to an invest M unfortunately the investment options in Pokémon are unsurprisingly very bad it's not like there's a Kanto stock market this is a children's game after all the only investment option is what I've already been collecting items throughout this playthrough I've been collecting items but I haven't been selling them because I knew I was going to hit the money cap those items still have value it's whatever I could sell them for and that value is kept outside side of my cash so by taking my cash and moving that value to items I can keep increasing my cash and increasing my net worth the value of my Cash Plus the value of my items I just need to find an item that maximizes the value I can get back in a perfect world I'd be able to buy an item for one value let's say $100 and then sell it back for that same $100 but this isn't a perfect world it's a Pokémon game in fact every single item you can buy Buy in fire red sells for exactly half the price meaning a 50% loss on every investment you make a 50% loss would make you the worst financial adviser in the world or the most successful user on our Wall Street bets but I don't really have a choice if I max out my money and continue through the game I'll be making zero additional dollars but if I invest in items I'll at least get some money which is better than nothing at the end of the day the best thing for me to do is to transfer my cash to items but only the cash that would be lost by hitting the cap I need to get as close as possible to $999,999 without ever hitting it so I dumped some money into Ultra Balls and continue through the playthrough fighting all the trainers and collecting all the items in the Pokémon Mansion cinear and the surrounding routes I also take up Bill's offer to visit the sevy islands and get a bunch of additional money there whenever I get close to the cash cap I dump more money into Ultra Balls and continue on eventually I find myself in the eighth gym taking on giovan's ground type Pokemon this battle is normally a walk in the park but because I'm using a weak normal type move against Pokemon with rock types and strong defenses I actually lose this fight retrying the fight a few times and the result is still the same Meowth just can't do it on his own so I need to bring in a relief pitcher someone who can bridge the gap to Victory someone Brave someone resilient someone to elevate this team to reach their full potential someone who is another Meowth I I just want another Meowth thankfully I was given one Pokeball that I can't sell it's the master ball but I can't sell it so it's worth nothing this time I actually do level up my Meowth to a Persian for some extra power The Amulet coin doubles any paydays used as long as the Pokemon holding the item entered the fight so both cats can make the full money even though there's only one amulet coin we wrap up all the trainers we have access to and get every single item that's worth it even making trades just to get items I clear out Victory Road which is super annoying to do all the puzzles multiple times but we finally make it through and now we can take on the Elite 4 these final battles are a delicate balance in a challenge like this I obviously want to only use payday to get as much money as I can but with such strong Pokémon the issue is actually staying alive especially over the course of five fights where I absolutely refuse to use any valuable healing items Persian and the power it brings is helpful but even at level 100 it's not strong enough to obliterate everything I spent a few hours attempting the Elite 4 multiple times resetting in between until I found a solution that found The Sweet Spot of payday and Staying Alive by having Persian as the main fighter I'm doing solid damage not so much that I can one-hot everything but enough to KO Pokémon before they hurt me too much I'm also holding an item that isn't the amulet coin thanks to the item finder I was able to pick up two copies of the leftovers item which heals 1/16th of your health every turn this not only keeps me healthy but is a held item that isn't consumed through use meaning its value will still be the same no matter how often I use it by playing on switch mode I can bring in Meowth only when the opportunity is Right using a few paydays but more importantly holding the amulet coin multiplying all paydays used by both Meowth and Persian I do this for every fight in the Indigo Plateau switching between the two as necessary payday has 20 PP so I make sure to use all 20 from Persian and all 20 from meow I also have two Lepa berries which restore 10 PP each and they're only worth $10 each meaning I can get way more value from them by restoring Persian paid AP through my testing I also found it valuable able to use one $600 ether giving me an additional 10 PP through five fights and 70 paydays I made a total of $128,100 not too shabby for five fights there's a bit of postgame Shenanigans I can complete for some extra dough but to unlock it I need to get the National Pokedex by having 60 pokeddex entries in addition to the 40 Pokémon I collected for the amulet coin I was able to get eight more through gift Pokémon evolutions and trades of Pokémon I already had meaning I only needed 12 more there wasn't anything else I could catch for free so begrudgingly I had to use pokeballs although only four of them I can minimize my loss by getting three Pokémon for every Pokeball I use Caterpie Metapod and Butterfree in one Weedle Kakuna and Beedrill in another and Pidgey Pidgeotto and Pidgeot in a third these are the only available three evolution Pokémon that evolve fully through level up but by catching a Ponyta and trading it to an NPC for seal and then evolving seal into dong I can add three Pokedex entries with one ball giving me a grand total of 60 Pokémon and unlocking the post game from here I went through Islands 4 through 7 collecting all the items and fighting all the trainers I ended up catching two more abas so I could use the move trick to steal a few valuable items during trainer fights but aside from that it was business as usual all I had left was one trip to the Cerulean cave where I focused on what was really important a look at Mewtwo fun okay bye don't care and with that every trainer was fought and every item was collected so now I can total everything up and tell you roughly how rich you can become in Pokémon Fire Red using some planning I was able to transfer a bunch of money over to Ultra Balls and ended ended up getting back to $999,999 which isn't perfect but it's very close so no money was wasted well here it is the moment you've all been waiting for if you don't use any repeatable methods of making money and play the game as optimally as you can for maximizing profit the rough total you can get to is 2 mil $138,400 kind of low honestly I know a lot of my money was haved by investing in Ultra Balls but 2 million doesn't feel like that much when I literally did everything I could to make a profit obviously $2 million is a ton of money and God forbid a 10-year-old get their hands on that much cash I mean just think of the Roo they'd buy but the conclusion that I can draw from this is that money doesn't really matter the Poke economy just doesn't revolve around profit if you try to capitalize on it you just end up with a a few extra bucks and two weirdly strong cats the true value is the memories that I made from this journey and the people in the places that I got to see I mean at the end of the day I still can't buy that bike
