atelierpenny | My favorite "roguelike" (is made up)

One day, a friend at uni showed me this video:

I thought it frankly looked fucking ridiculous. Speedrunners are always getting up to shenanigans, and seeing this (at the time) low view youtube video of a guy on discord with his friends getting every single Pokemon in Blue Rescue team got a kick out of me. I skimmed through it a few times out of curiosity and was really impressed by the planning and time that went into this massive project, so I subscribed and largely forgot about the channel. One day, however, he started an even more colossal project which is still ongoing to this day:

youtu.be/m-wSbgsk4a0

Blue Rescue Team has a mammoth postgame, towering far larger than the game itself. This wealth of stuff to do is in no small part thanks to the slew of 99f dungeons the endgame. Casually, this totally sucks. They get really tiring after a while, so few even bother to attempt the two “level reset” dungeons: Joyous Tower and Purity Forest.

Joyous Tower is a little bit looser in its rules, you can bring a few items and stuff, but Purity Forest has no preparation required outside of mental prep. You are reset to level 1, no items or money, no saving, just your lil guy climbing 99 brutal and ruthless floors. Again, casually, this dungeon is infamous and hated. Any prep of vitamins and items and money and leveling gathered throughout the game is thrown completely out the window for a gauntlet of concentration, knowledge checks, resource management, and luck. With the ol' internet, casuals have plenty of tips and tricks to make beating this dungeon beatable within the first few attempts. Easy to obtain Pokemon like Charizard or the Abra line and the quicksaving exploit make this dungeon pretty smooth. So you beat PF, get your Celebi, and you're done! You don't gotta play the dungeon anymore, a relief for the majority of players who got far enough to learn to hate this place.

So, lets beat it with Sunkern.

Purity Forest is definitely bullshit sometimes. You can get no food for long enough that you die, you can step on invisible trap tiles stealing your resources or damn near killing you outright, spawns after going to a new floor can completely screw you with a room filled with screen nukes, and this is on top of the inherent randomness to Pokemon and to Mystery Dungeon itself. But I have found some truly admirable beauty in the designedness of this place.

Let us start with whats against you: The Pokemon. Early floors are caked with low yield Pokemon like Caterpie who give single digit experience (exp is tied to the species of Pokemon rather than level or level difference. It is also increased if you use a move on them instead of regular attacks or items), stat-lowering spammers to make you weaker than your level one stats already are, and randomness like metronome spamming Togepi that can ruin any promising start. You need to clean these easier floors out to give yourself stuff to work with later on, but you will have your moves drained quickly by these guys.

Later on you have Exeggutor and the Swablu line, who spams multi hit moves (which are overpowered in PMD) and hypnosis, high fixed damage cross map projectile shooting Electrode, and dangerous agility users who can turn a room full of multiple enemies into a dead run instantly (agility makes you just act twice as often in PMD, and affects the whole room of the user's side). And of course, the nightmare 80f+. Parasect has strong tanky stats, self healing, and a 100% accurate sleep screen nuke. Shuppet sticks to you like glue, following you through walls and draining precious resources with spite. Camerupt has a nasty screen nuke that varies in power, multiple Pokemon have agility and multi hit moves. And of course, we have PF's true biggest villain in Venomoth. Venomoth's silver wind is a STAB (the highest damage modifier in BRT, higher than super effective) screen nuke that can give it an omniboost. This boost of course increases speed, allowing it to act again, where it is likely to cast silver wind again, possibly getting the omniboost again, and again and again, that is if you even can survive the first one. Loading in to a room with a red dot out of your line of sight above floor 86 is some of the most terrified I have been in a game, knowing I can lose my hours of progress if I click anything carelessly.

PF's items are from a pool spawning on certain floors, but they are very considered for nearly all Pokemon one could bring in. The TM pool is very considered in this regard, carrying strong moves learned by most strong pokemon like Earthquake and Ice Beam. More common is stuff like Facade and Hidden Power, still very worth your time as nearly every Pokemon can learn those. Your three biggest weapons among the TM pool are Rest, Attract, and Frustration. Rest stops you for a few turns but fully heals your health and status. Health recovers slowly in this game, and a go-to full heal is extremely reliable even with the startup turns. Status clearing items are nearly extinct (excluding some sneaky exceptions) and you can only clear your poison or burn reliably by getting to the next floor. Poison turns off your automatic regeneration, so the clock is ticking as soon as you get poisoned to get to those stairs. Rest, thankfully, makes this a non issue. Attract works on all Pokemon in BRT, as gender is not in this game. This makes attract essentially a temporary kill on anything in the game at point blank, letting you run away and hide from big threats or kill them slowly. Frustration is a fixed damage move that is supposed to go down as you use a game mechanic that is not a thing at all in PF, so it never goes down and stays as a fixed 45 damage which remains really good through the end. It is worth noting you can “link” moves which essentially lets you use multiple attacks at once and that you can learn multiple copies of the same move in this game, so two frustrations can turn into a 90 damage attack that kills most threats in the dungeon outright.

The items almost all have their uses, but I will cover the big three here. Warp Scarf is a cheap held item that warps the user to a random spot on the floor after a random amount of turns. Very often in PF you will be nearly cornered by a big threat looking to end your run and warp scarf will get you out of there easily without using consumables. You can even throw it to other Pokemon and have them use it in really tight situations to save yourself if you're near the exit. I have seen a lot of moments where Whom, the inventor of the challenge to beat PF with every Pokemon, on huge sprawling floors simply waits until warp scarf drops him off near the end. This is especially a livesaver when you are playing some garbage like Magikarp who learns no moves and cannot fight back against a thing.

On paper, pass scarf is the best item in the game. It will, at the cost of some hunger gauge, redirect most direct attacks in the game back at opponents. There are a ton of caveats, such as not getting exp for enemies defeated this way and not redirecting many of the most dangerous attacks, but it still invalidates most Pokemon in the dungeon easily.

X Ray Specs is, in my opinion, actually the best item. X Ray Specs allows you to see the location of all items and enemies on the floor. You can breeze through floors going to only the rooms with items, you can dance around in hallways to manipulate enemy pathing to never see you, you can throw consumables at enemies from miles away, you can avoid nearly anything with smart enough play.

Before I wrap things up, it is worth mentioning the energy of a PF climb is very different in the Rescue Team remake for the switch. In RTDX, you can recruit enemies and you have a second passive you can select before entering, making the climb on the whole much easier to prepare for and complete. Not a bad thing and I think it is more fun for most people, just not what I am looking for.

Obviously it depends which Pokemon you are using, but it is not as unfair as it seems. I have only scratched the surface, but I have rarely found a loop-based game that rewards you for your game knowledge as much as purity forest. I can see clear as day when a loss is my fault. Recently, I have lost a run for

-Not knowing that screen nukes hit yourself when you are confused
-Misunderstanding a minute interaction of the “slow” status
-not realizing that some Pokemon have abilities that make them immune to attract

-using a move with a burn chance to activate enemy Rattata's guts accidentally and dying to the damage boosted attack

and WON runs for

-using a pounce orb, an unassuming item that makes you leap forward, to jump into the water with a pokemon that cannot cross water, which causes them to teleport somewhere random

-using a grimy food (which gives a random status effect) and Shroomish's effect spore to clear poison and burn by intentionally inflicting yourself with paralysis, which clears both

-using a switcher orb to set up a cross map teleport to let me rob the store

-realizing the Skarmory on 15-17f are extremely high exp yield and grinding for exp on those floors when available

-using an item which makes me gain exp for the damage I take and a trapped tile that makes me take fixed damage to grind for exp by stepping on spikes repeatedly

and soooo much more. Game rules.