Pokemon Violet Nuzlocke Part 1: The Beginning (It’s Playtime!)

Hello everyone, and welcome to It’s Playtime! Time for my next long-running series! Is this another excuse to talk about Pokemon some more? Yes.

Anyway, today we’re going to play a nuzlocke. I know, totally the most unique Pokemon challenge out there. While this challenge is pretty typical, I wanted to give it a shot in blog form. I think it’ll be pretty entertaining.

For the two people who don’t know, nuzlockes are a Pokemon challenge where if a Pokemon faints, it’s dead forever. There are other rules, such as only being able to catch the first encounter on each route, and nicknaming every catch to get attached to them. There are hardcore rules, but I’ll use them in a future challenge.

I wanted to play a Pokemon game from the switch, but I wasn’t entirely sure which one. So, I put every mainline game on the switch into a wheel and spun it. The arrow landed on Pokemon Violet. Well, I guess it is relevant right now. I’m a big fan of this game, so I like this outcome.

But no more chatter. Into the game we go!

First of all, we gotta decide what I look like in this game. So, obviously, since the challenge doesn’t focus on appearance, I chose the generic appearance.

…Just kidding. In past challenges I’ve done on my own, I made myself the weirdest character I could possibly be.

So, uh, meet Help. Pretty fitting. Probably could’ve done worse, to be honest.

Anyway, it’s time for the best part of Pokemon Violet! Long, drawn-out cutscenes and dialogue! Fun… Well, you don’t have to suffer through that. I’m assuming most of you have played Pokemon Violet, but if this is somehow how you want to experience the game… Honestly, a weird choice, but I’ll briefly go over events.

A robotic lizard flies out of a chasm and dies.

In unrelated news, Help. gets enrolled in the academy we’re not going to see throughout this challenge and Director Clavell gives them the option of 3 starters. After we meet Nemona, a person with a crippling battle addiction, I get the chance to pick a starter.

I decided to leave this starter choice up to fate. Especially since I like every Paldea starter on one level or another. So, I rolled it, and got Fuecoco! Great, I actually love the Fuecoco line! It’s quickly becoming one of my favorites, but I chose Sprigatito on my first playthrough. So, this is my chance to use one.

Then, the nicknaming screen came up, and I realized my little Fuecoco was a girl! Honestly, I kind of freaked out after seeing that. A female Fuecoco sounds so adorable to me. I named her Pepper, because… she’s literally a chili pepper gator. Meanwhile, Nemona picks the cat because… I don’t know, she doesn’t know type advantages or something. Quaxly goes with Director Clavell which totally doesn’t foreshadow anything ever.

Nemona asks us to battle immediately. Addictions really get to people sometimes. On the way over, I checked Pepper’s summary. Then, I saw a sight that wasn’t too pleasant. Pepper had an adamant nature (+Attack, -Special Attack). That’s a horrible nature for a special attacker. I looked up nature mints, but I only get those after beating 6 gyms. Great.

I did think about transferring a Pokemon over with a nature mint with Pokemon Home, but I decided that might be cheating. We’re just going to have to deal with a bad nature starter until we unlock the mints in this file. Hey, it makes things harder, at least.

We beat up Nemona’s cat, of course. It would have been pretty pathetic to lose there. Then, we get a totally-not-important sandwich from Mom and some other items before setting off on our adventure.

I made it on the first route, or Poco Path. What’s my first encounter? Well, it’s… Oh wait, Nemona forces you into one. Well, the Lechonk we’re forced to encounter IS catchable, so I guess this counts. I damaged it a little before realizing that everything on the first route can basically be caught without damage. I caught the Lechonk, naming it “Snort”. I’ll be honest, I don’t expect that this will stay on the team long. Just a hunch.

We continue through until we find the dead robotic lizard from earlier. Oh wait, never mind, it’s alive. We managed to heal all of its injuries simultaneously with Mom’s sandwich. Yeah, sounds accurate enough.

Now, we’ve arrived at Inlet Grotto. We can catch Pokemon here! A Houndour would be interesting, or maybe even a Diglett. I wonder which one we’ll end up finding-

A Yungoos. Okay, better than nothing, I guess. After a quick capture, I named her “Peanut”. A pretty charming name for a Pokemon I’m probably not going to use. But hey, it’s not the worst Pokemon in the world.

Then, the level 40 Houndoom from inside the cave comes out, attacks, and… I know what you might be thinking. Auto-death, that’s pretty brutal, but I don’t count it. It’s literally a scripted kill, and I’m not a fan of that. I’m not counting it. Plus, the HP bar doesn’t even go down and we don’t get the fainted message. I’m just gonna assume I returned my Pokemon and got out of there.

After escaping, the robot lizard turns weaker so we don’t get to use an OP legendary from the get-go. We meet a jerk guy named Arven at the lighthouse nearby who knows the lizard, has daddy issues, and thinks we’re not worthy of the lizard. So, we beat up his squirrel and got out of there.

After that, we get another encounter. The first thing I spotted was a Psyduck standing awkwardly by a bridge. So, I caught that, getting yet another female. My team has a ton of girl power right now. I did find more promise in Psyduck, since it’s a decent water type for this point in the game. I named her “Quackas” because I thought it sounded fun.

We fought a few trainers on the way to get some experience and headed for Mesagoza. Here we get the first Nemona battle, which I was slightly nervous about. Pepper would have to handle this herself, since my other members weren’t fit to face a tera Pawmi. Pepper did manage to solo both Sprigatito and Pawmi, though Pawmi got Pepper down to red health with a couple of thunder shocks. I had to use one of my potions to make sure Pepper wouldn’t die this early on. That would’ve been embarrassing.

Then, we get the tour of Mesagoza. I didn’t need anything to change my beautiful look, so I just bought a Charcoal from the Delibird Store to give to Pepper. I’ll probably get more items there later.

Also, we beat up the two Team Star grunts. As you can expect, nothing eventful happened here. We did get access to the tera orb though, so that’s cool. We met a random uniquely designed girl who showed up in this game’s advertising. Eh, probably not important.

We go through the usual Uva Academy stuff. We meet that Arven guy again, who wants our help to get magical herbs, as well as this person named Cassiopeia who wants us to take down Team Star. And, of course, Nemona tells us about Pokemon gyms and where to find them. We have ourselves our three storylines.

Oh, also Professor Turo is there and tells us to take care of the robotic lizard or something. I’m sure this isn’t important.

After a timeskip, Director Clavell tells everyone about the treasure hunt, where you can just do anything you want to. Basically, we’re freed from cutscene jail. Rejoice!

I decide to head for the first gym first, since despite this being open world, there’s a certain order in which you do things. According to the levels of the game, anyway. The first gym is bug, so that won’t be too hard to deal with.

But before that, we got to get our next encounter! We have access to tera raid dens now, and some people use those as encounters. However, I tried one, and realized it was far too easy to die and far too difficult to catch the Pokemon. I just suck at tackling tera raid dens anyway, even in my main file. So, I decided to use my usual method of catching the first thing that catches my eye. This time, it was a Hoppip. Okay, not great, but it’d be cool to have a fire-water-grass core early on. So, I decided to weaken the Hoppip a bit with a few bites from Pepper.

The second one was a crit and it died. Great.

Trying to ignore what just happened, I did a trainer battle or two to level some of my Pokemon up and headed into the gym… to do the challenge.

Yeah, you know how this went. It’s difficult to FAIL the olive roll challenge. So, let’s skip to the gym battle. However, my memory was a little incorrect on the gym leader’s levels, because Pepper were two levels under her ace. Whoops. Oh well, should be more suspenseful, right?

Well, the first two Pokemon were pretty easy to deal with. Then comes Katy’s Teddiursa. Even with the bug tera, I wasn’t taking this seriously. I decided to tera Pepper into fire and take on the Teddiursa. It was only then that I noticed it had started raining. Okay, a bit more worried now. At first, Teddiursa simply used Fury Swipes, and I thought I was in the clear. Then, Teddiursa started to use Fury Cutter and it actually did a decent amount of damage. That’s a problem, because Fury Cutter gets stronger with every successful hit. Thankfully, Pepper survived with a little less than half health on the next fury cutter and used tera boost ember to defeat Teddiursa. We have gotten the first badge!

Now, I was planning to do the first titan or maybe even the first Team Star boss. But, I don’t know if you noticed, but the story parts of Pokemon Violet really made things drag on in time. So, we’ll have to wait for those things in the next part.

That’ll be all for now! There will be a lot more progress in the game next time, I promise. More actual gameplay, as well as the usual chaos and mistakes I make. See you next time we come back to the journey of… Help!

This article and more seen on my blog site, Violet Pages.