Soft Lock Picking: The Worst Bug Catcher Battle

I really appreciate how Pikasprey is no longer satisfied with softlocking, instead coming up with escapable locks which require going through a Saw situation before escaping.

I love how this series has gone from "a softlock plausible enough that Nintendo directly addressed it" to "I put this ten year old kid in a saw trap."

There are a few ways to make this softlock even worse. First of all, you can obviously make the Weezing shiny. This just gives the shiny-lovers a bit of extra pain should they restart the file. Second, have the Weezing have both Explosion and Selfdestruct. One of the possible disobedience actions is the Pokemon using a move other than what you chose. With both exploding moves, even if Weezing's disobedience is to use a different move, it'd still explode anyway, which reduces the chance of a "successful" disobedience turn. You can also throw Memento on there, a move that makes the user faint while lowering the opponent's Attack and Special Attack by 2 stages each. That way, if that move gets chosen, you lose the battle and don't even get the satisfaction of knocking out the Weedle.

Softlock's kinda messed up when you think about it. A trainer is repeatedly telling the Weezing to kill itself, with the poor ball of fumes ignoring them

One must imagine Pikasprey happy

I wanted to find a probability to escape this softlock, so I've spent way too much effort looking into this. Here are the results of that effort. In the best case, we should have a Weezing with perfect HP and Defense EVs/IVs, 0 Attack EVs/IVs, and a Bold (+Def/-Atk) nature. To further sweeten the odds, we'll also assume the Weedle has 0-8 HP IVs. (Weedle's Attack IV and nature don't actually matter; the damage it deals is the same regardless.) In this case, Weezing has 334 HP, and Weedle has 26 HP. The damage values are as follows: - Weedle's Poison Sting deals 1 damage, with a 1/16 chance of dealing 2 damage. On a critical hit, it deals 3 damage, with a 1/16 chance of dealing 4 damage. - Weedle's Struggle deals 2 damage, with a 1/16 chance of dealing 3 damage. On a critical hit, it deals 5 damage, with a 1/16 chance of dealing 6 damage. Regardless, Weedle will always take 1 HP of recoil damage. - If Weezing hurts itself in confusion, it takes 26-31 damage (3/16 chance each of 26, 27, 28, 29, and 30, and 1/16 chance of 31). Here are the relevant probabilities when Weezing tries to attack: - It has a 37845/131072 (~28.9%) chance of going to sleep for 1-5 turns. - It has a 21547/65536 (~32.9%) chance of doing nothing. - It has a 37845/131072 (~28.9%) chance of hurting itself in confusion. - It has a 3/32 (~9.4%) chance of using Explosion successfully, immediately losing the battle. With these probabilities in mind, I ran 1,000,000 simulations of this battle in Python, and I won only 99 times, for a win rate of around 1 in 10,000. The average battle lasted ~17.576 turns, so if each turn takes ~10 seconds, then it takes, on average, ~20.3 days to escape this softlock.

"Hey, wait up! What's the hurry? Why the rush?" the bug catcher asked calmly

God I love these videos about video game children needing to perform rigorous tasks to escape living their entire lives around people who will do absolutely nothing to help them get back home 💯💯💯

One thing to note is that struggle in gen 3 only does 1/4 of damage dealt as recoil. So weedle would have to struggle whatever number it’s actual HP is because of how little dmg struggle would be doing

There's something so special about your specific type of videos. Every time you rock up with an obvious softlock, I think "oh, how unoriginal. An unwinnable battle." And then you point out a 1 in 686,251 chance you can progress through a ridiculous mechanic and I just can't help but admire how each and every way you pick softlocks is different and interesting.

Sammy: What’s the rush? Pikasprey: And I took that personally

I remember, back in 4t h grade, my friend's little brother got himself into a very annoying state in Pokemon Yellow at Pewter City and I was asked to "fix" it. He made the game needlessly difficult (and wouldn't let me start a new save and catch a Mankey or Nidoran on route 22) by repeatedly challenging Brock with only Pikachu, saving after he fainted until he ran out of money, and hadn't caught any other Pokemon and (I assume) inadvertently tossed his Pokeballs. So he was stuck with a ridiculous amount of grinding until Pikachu could KO Geodude and Onix with just Quick Attack or Slam. Pretty sure he couldn't read yet, as his player name was AAAAAAAA.

Something about this soft lock in particular feels especially brutal and insulting, lol. Excellent work as usual.

since (as you said) it takes less time to restart the game, you should've made Weezing shiny so the player has to decide whether to keep trying to get a lv.100 shiny or lose it. Top notch content as always

This is so close to being even more evil. There's a hidden Pokeball in Pewter City to pick up, you can catch something and escape. But if that wasn't there... Weedle kid only gives $108, so if the save was left with less than $92, beating the Weedle wouldn't have accomplished anything. You'd have had to do another perfect battle against the gym trainer or Brock to finally get more money, and they both have two Pokemon, so that's even more turns of no explosion required. Shame, really.

Always love seeing you break these games in their attempts to try to prevent the player from softlocking themselves. There is always something they overlook because once you have people playing the game they will break it in ways they never could imagine.

The funny thing here is that by making the Weezing level 100 you actually INCREASE the chance of getting out of this softlock. The pokemon's chance to disobey increases the higher level it is, and in this challenge a higher chance to disobey makes the battle easier A level 100 pokemon has around 91% chance to disobey a player with no badges. A level 17 Koffing (the lowest level to learn selfdestruct) has around 60%. So if you wanted to make the challenge even more impossible you'd make the pokemon lower level

This reminds me of a battle I recently had in Black2. I had the event lv100 Zekrom in my party and it almost lost to the first youngster on route 20. He used leer multiple times and Zekrom almost killed itself by disobedient confusion damage.

The Weezing is too proud of itself to obey a command to make itself be KO'd.

Its even worse bc weezing here has a brave nature, making her attack higher so confusion does more damage to herself. If she had a lonely nature itd be even worse