Soft Lock Picking: Trapped With Caterpie For 240 Days

[Music] hello Internet users and welcome back to another instructional video on how to not play Pokemon when it comes to soft locking the Pokemon games I'd say that the one generation I've gotten the least requests for has been the second one and that's really not too surprising because of the focus on its real-time clock system there are numerous daily items and events that can be accessed thus the player almost always has a way to obtain more money in Pokemon even if they got rid of everything intentionally of course there have been soft locks discovered over the years with similar setups to what I've covered before in Gen 1 and 3 you can strand yourself on some of the islands unable to fly or swim to safety however for this video I wanted to do something a bit more elaborate by using the game's own clock mechanics against it I wanted to see if I could craft a softlock with an escape so obvious but also so obnoxious that nobody would ever try to seriously escape it with that in mind we're going to need the help of a weak little Pokemon in this case we'll be trapping ourselves with Caterpie now in order for this lock to work the way I intend it will need to be done on a Japanese Gen 2 cartridge what you're about to see me do can still be done on the international versions but as you'll see a bit later in this video the Japanese version specifically have a few quirks that will allow this setup to be even more infuriating of the three games I'm going to be playing pokemon crystal however at times I will be using footage from the English version so that it's easier to follow along with what happens in this video without wasting any time here is how to set up the save file first you just need to play the game normally up to a certain point keep it in mind three very important details be absolutely certain that you never let your mother save money for you if we're going to be throwing away all of our money and items later on we obviously don't want her to have anything to give us later after that happens as long as she isn't given anything she will also not be able to buy and send the player any additional items through the PC storage system so remember kids for this to work you need to make sure that ninety mother can come save you later on the second detail to remember is to avoid entering the ecruteak city Pokemon Center doing so will trigger the event with bill this will come into play later on so for now just avoid entering this building and finally make sure you don't pick up any of the fishing rods they're all completely optional and once they're picked up you can never remove them from your inventory in this game for this setup to work it is very important that none of these are obtained at any point in your playthrough other than that play the game like you normally would until you defeat Lance that's right this time we're actually going to need to be the champion in order for this to work despite that though I promise you we're still going to be putting this same file in a pretty pathetic States the reason Lance needs to be defeated is because of this old man here at the Pokemon League ordinarily when you speak to him he will allow the player to teleport all the way back to new bark town the reason for this is because the Pokemon League is located in Kanto and while the player is on the Kanto map they are unable to use fly to return to any location in Johto in addition to being a quick way to get back to Johto this man is also a measure to prevent the player from getting stuck however once the player has beaten Lance this man will simply disappear this is because that right after becoming the champion Professor Elm will give you a ticket for the ferry that travels to vermilion City if the game expects the player to start exploring Kanto unlocking the ability to freely fly around to each town they visit because of this the devs must have assumed that there was no longer any need for this man's teleporting service little did they realize though that this opens up a huge opportunity for the player to trap themselves now with all of those things in mind we're ready to begin the true sent up to this lock this begins as soon as you load up your game after defeating Lance for the first time number one catch a Caterpie heading over the cherry grove you can find low level Pokemon to the north it is here that we will obtain the Pokemon we will be spending quite a bit of time with in the future as a quick side note silver version does not have Caterpie in this location and if you're playing that version you'd have to get one by entering the bug catching contest at national hark although we don't need canapes specifically the reason I've chosen it is because it is unable to learn any moves quite literally Caterpie can only ever know the moves tackle in string shot no TMS no HMS no level up move is not even the possibility of egg moves because it has access to next to nothing this makes Caterpie a perfect Pokemon to use for an obnoxious soft lock number to go back to the pokemon league with Caterpie in hand the next thing we're going to do is immediately return to the Pokemon League this means that will be completely ignoring professor elm who at this point is waiting to give us a ticket for the SS aqua it should go without saying but when heading back to the league it is important to use the same path you took the first time if you enter from Viridian City then this lock will no longer be possible to set up you see at the gate where the players badges are checked there are two NPCs blocking off two entrances the one on the Left guards mount silver and will not disappear until you've collected all eight of the Kanto badges the one on the right blocks the road leading to Viridian City the event trigger to get them to disappear permanently is to enter this building from Viridian City most people might assume that he'd go away when you become the champion but he remains here so that the player has no choice but to enter Kanto via the SS aqua number three pick up every item available for the next step you can probably see where this is going this trap is going to involve being stranded within a long stretch of areas the starting point for this cage is when you cross the water after leaving toad you'll falls the end point is of course the Pokemon League itself so now in preparation for what's next we'll need to pick up every single possible item between these two points this includes all of route 26 route 27 in victory Road there are also a few hidden items so make sure you get those as well number four release all of your other Pokemon now that we're back at the Pokemon League the next step is to release all of your Pokemon except for Caterpie in the first two generations there are no restrictions on what pokemon can be released so it's easy to get rid of all your Pokemon that no or are able to no H moves number five get rid of all your items and money you should all know how this goes by now spend everything you have and then throw your entire inventory away now we'll be unable to buy pokeballs and have nothing to sell either and now for the final step heal and save at the pokemon league once this is done you will have succeeded in putting your save file in a very horrific State let's take a closer look at this and really examine how dire the situation is right now our only Pokemon is a level 3 Caterpie if we were to advance forward into the Elite Four Caterpie would not be able to make it past wills first Pokemon let alone his entire team upon losing the player will return to the Pokemon Center that was last used which is of course the Pokemon League if we instead try to go backwards we'll have to go through victory road again you might assume that this is impossible as well due to the level of the wild Pokemon here every encounter would no doubt prevent the player from running away and would result in Caterpie being knocked out however an easy solution to this is to simply save the game every time you take a step whenever you get an encounter simply reset the game and continue the process although it may be tedious this method guarantees that the player can always get through Victory Road regardless of what Pokemon they have with them it's also worth noting that in gen - there are no HM moves required for this area so now that we're back at route 26 we can continue to travel backwards until we reach the water's edge at route 27 this is as far as we can go since Caterpie cannot learn surf at this point all of the trainers on route 26 and 27 would be defeated however there is still a way to battle some of them a mechanic introduced in Gen 2 is the ability to exchange phone numbers with certain trainers occasionally these trainers will call the player sometimes asking for a rematch this however won't make a difference in our current situation within the few areas that were stuck in there are a couple of trainers that can be rebuttal unfortunately they are simply too strong for Caterpie to do anything but lose as well a feature that is exclusive to pokemon crystal is that a select few of these trainers will randomly call and give the player special items however once again the trainers we have accessed you are not among the group that can give these items for Crystal version they're technically is an item giving trainer on Route 27 but he is out of reach requiring serf to get to where he is and if you thought you could try leveling up Caterpie from wild encounters I'm afraid that isn't going to work either for both routes and Victory Road there is not a single possible wild encounter that our low-level Caterpie is capable of winning this is exactly why we didn't pick up any of the fishing rods earlier in the game if we had an old rod it would have been possible to gain experience by defeating low-level Magikarp but we didn't get it and now it's impossible to go back for it no next I want to talk about trading in the first two generations it technically is possible to still trade with another game even when you only have one Pokemon however I usually don't focus on that too much the main reason I do these videos is to examine how a game can be made unplayable by exploiting its intended mechanics in my opinion if you've reached a point where you need additional hardware software and an add-on just to put your save file in a playable state you've more than proven that there is a fatal flaw within the game's design however for this particular video I've set things up so that attempting to trade will also be as inconvenient as possible for the player as you'll recall this has been setup on a Japanese version of Pokemon crystal when it comes to the first two generations the Japanese versions are only able to perform a successful trade with other Japanese versions let's say for example you're trying to connect a North American Pokemon gold to this crystal cartridge although the games technically could initiate a trade sequence the data on the cartridges are too different if these two games were to go through with a trade both would freak out having no idea what kind of Pokemon data has been sent to them this will result in the corruption of the save file of both games in this situation you might be wondering if that's the case then why is a trade even allowed to occur between a Japanese and non Japanese game well at the time of Gen 2 is released the chances of this kind of trade occurring between casual players were incredibly slim whether the localization team was aware of this potential game corruption or not it certainly didn't seem worth the time or effort to put in some kind of mesh to disallow trading with Japanese cartridges however I should mention that in the case of the 3ds Virtual Console versions the games actually do now prevent trading between Japanese and non Japanese games this is due to the fact that the VC releases make use of the 3ds as wireless functions to connect the games together in the process of this change it made perfect sense to stop a well-known game corrupting issue with the original trade feature it may have taken almost 17 years to address but better late than ever I guess but anyway the point of all this is is that in the save file we've set up an escape via trading is only going to be possible using another Japanese cartridge additionally during the set up you'll recall that I said to avoid the ecruteak Pokemon Center because of this this save file does not have the time capsule event active meaning that the player also cannot trade with the Japanese versions of Gen 1 either it should also go without saying that the VC releases cannot connect to a gameboy either with this we have severely limited what our game can even connect to so let's say that once you've set up this soft lock you handed the Gameboy and cartridge to a random Pokemon fan and told them to escape if they were to do this by using something other than the game itself they would need the following an additional Gameboy a link cable a Japanese gentle with in the current year will likely require a replace save battery to work and if they were to try and use pokemon stadium 2 instead they would need a Japanese copy of the game an n64 transfer pack either a Japanese n64 or a mod at n64 that can play Japanese cards remember the goal here was to make trading as inconvenient as possible and I think most would agree the majority of fans aren't going to have these things just laying around if at that point you for some reason wanted to spend some money on these things it would be much cheaper to just buy a cheating device to get yourself out of this so for the people that demanded I take trade and into account for the older generations I've made it inconvenient enough to the point where cheating is infinitely easier and more affordable by the way a fun fact sometime after I recorded footage of myself walking through walls when I booted up the English save file my character had suddenly changed in girl while still having the color palette of a boy this won't go away no matter what I do and I have no idea why this occurred as I've messed with this exact cheat plenty of times in the past with no issues I know that there is a well-known glitch that lets you do this intentionally but I swear I didn't do anything close to that I'm only just guessing that my brief instance of walking through walls was what triggered this because I really have no other way to make sense here so anyway for the rest of this video some of the English footage will now feature my changed character instead I didn't want to replay the entire game again just to keep the last few pieces of footage consistent but I'm pretty much forced to edit in an explanation now so I don't get a thousand comments asking what's going on it just pretend that everything is fine and add this to the list of nonsense you're seen in this video but anyways that aside as things are now you may be wondering if there is still any other options available to the player compared to some of the other softlocks I've previously done this one gives us quite a bit of extra room to wander around but still we're seemingly stuck with no way to continue playing the game normally provided that you've done the setup properly it really seems like there's nothing you can do except start a new game or wander around endlessly letting Caterpie get knocked out however in this situation there is still one thing you can do one tiny detail that provides the obvious but obnoxious escape I mentioned earlier within our prison there is only one single way to obtain more items and it comes from this tree here on route 26 because Gen 2 introduced both a time system in held items to the series there are plenty of these trees placed throughout the game once per day the player can pick items like berries from these trees because these are pretty much an infinite source of obtaining items the sell price and positive effects of these berries are very minimal for this particular tree we can pick an ice berry which when consumed heals a pokemons burn so you might be asking well if there's a tree here then all you have to do is pick enough berries to sell until you can afford a pokeball right and you're correct that is absolutely what we're going to do however doing that is not as nearly as simple as you might expect you see if you were to take that ice berry all the way back to the Pokemon League you would discover just how little value it has only being worth literally five polka dollars no next you need to realize that a standard pokeball cost 200 if that means that in order to afford a single one you'll need exactly 40 ice berries which means that in order to escape you'll need to wait for at least 40 real-life days to pass making sure to check in daily to obtain every ice berry that certainly sounds annoying doesn't it but it isn't the most unreasonable thing in the world after all once you have that single pokeball it's just a matter of saving and resetting until it actually catches something then you can teach that Pokemon flier surf and get yourself out of here unfortunately if you thought it was going to be that easy I've got some bad news for you you see and Gen 2 at the Pokemon League they don't actually sell pokeballs no they only sell ultra balls which cost six times more than a normal pokémon I think you can see where I'm going with this so in this scenario this means that the escape method will require you to pick 240 daily ice berries all just for the chance to obtain another Pokemon and this is exactly what makes this particular trap so cruel going back to the idea of giving this cartridge to a random Pokemon fan to try and escape just imagine how someone would react at first they probably appear to be really confident since they appear to have such an open area to explore but as they wander they'll soon realize that they actually can't do a single thing besides interact with this tree and once they realize how much the berry is worth and how long it'll take to afford their escape I guarantee you that the life in their eyes will fade in the most satisfying way imaginable but right now there might be some of you out there clinging to hope asking what if you just manually changed the game's clock until you have 240 berries and unfortunately for you I also thought of that too so most people don't seem to be aware of this but in Gen 2 there is actually a secret method to changing the in-game clock in gold and silver by pressing down select in B at the same time on the title screen the game we'll ask you if you'd like to reset the clock upon hitting yes he'll then need to enter a password the required password is actually generated based on a few different factors within the current save file all of these things are the players name ID number and money however that information by itself isn't enough to tell you everything using one of the many tools you can find online you can enter this information to figure out what your generated password is supposed to be once this is entered the player can now set the day of the week and time to whatever they desire in pokemon crystal the method to accessing the clock reset function was made a bit more obscure this time on the title screen it must be done like this first you need to hold down select and B next you need to let go of down in B now you have to hold left and up on the d-pad and finally let go of the select button once this is done you'll be brought to the same screen that was seen in gold and silver the password you need is also determined the same way as before considering the roundabout method of accessing this function it's more than likely that this was only intended to be used for testing purposes by the developers but with that explanation out of the way you might have figured out what needs to be done next in order to accelerate the process of collecting 240 ice berries you're just going to have to painstakingly adjust the clock over and over entering that password many many times sure that will no doubt take a lot of time to do but it's still a lot shorter than waiting 240 real-life days right but like I said earlier I had considered this as well and this is yet another reason why we are playing on the Japanese version of the game for you see in all japanese versions of Gen 2 this clock reset feature is inaccessible to the player despite how clear it is that the player isn't supposed to be using this menu it was for some reason made accessible in the international releases this means that in our game the player has absolutely no choice but to wait for a real day to go by before they can ever pick another ice berry and there you have it folks no out-of-bounds glitches or sequence breaking required after making use of several intentional game mechanics in unintended ways we have created a savefile that is virtually unplayable without a 240 day long commitment of course there is no way that anyone would ever do this to themself by accident but the point is you technically can do it to give you an idea of just how long 240 days is let's say for example you started and pick your first ice berry on January 1st you would finish just before the end of August on the 28th that's eight long months of checking in daily just to make your game playable again a completely consistent escape method that requires no RNG but it's so obnoxious that nobody would ever actually go through with it thank you all for watching my name is McCaffrey and have a nice night thank you all for watching if you want to see more stuff from me you can always click on the things you see on screen here on my other channel I've also started another six miracle playthrough on Pokemon firered be seeing you all next time [Music]

Channel: Pikasprey Yellow

Views: 958,003

Rating: 4.9315357 out of 5

Keywords: Gaming, Video Games

Id: 9f_3yOTN78w

Length: 21min 2sec (1262 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 11 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/RoostersHaveTeeth]

PIKASPREY THE GOD

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I have never seen any one person put more effort into utterly pushing the game to its very limits than Pikasprey.