[Pokemon] Making Your First ZA Playthrough Last Longer
Or... How To Complete A Pokedex
Pokemon Legends: ZA comes out in less than 2 weeks, and so I wanted to share the way I've been playing new Pokemon games recently.
A lot of fans will complain about the way recent games play, and how easy they are. Personally, I haven't had that issue in a while. If you are playing a Pokemon game, even one you are going into blind, with 20+ years of Pokemon experience, and your only objective is to get to credits as quickly as possible, the game WILL NOT BE HARD. Some people do challenge runs instead to try and inflate the difficulty. Things like a Nuzlocke run, or my personal preference, a monotype run. Playing through SWSH for the first time using a mono-ghost team, with a Litwick egg traded to me by a friend as my starter, is maybe the most fun I have ever had with a Pokemon game. And also taught me JUST HOW MANY POKEMON LEARN BITE.
This post is not about any of that. As much as I enjoy monotype runs or other such challenge runs, they are kinda best suited for replaying a game, and not an initial playthrough. This is a type of challenge run designed specifically for your main, evergreen playthrough the one you keep for any DLC or Events or playing online or anything like that, and should work for any mainline Pokemon game.
Premise
The subtitle of this post kinda buried the lead on this one. The secret to making the game last longer is to complete the Pokedex. This is not hard, especially in any Switch game. As I said above, if getting to credits is your ONLY objective, it won't take long. So just give yourself an additional objective. In this case, completing the Pokedex. I'm not asking you to do the Professor Oak's Challenge where you have to catch every single Pokemon ever and fully evolve them before you progress in the game at all. That's a bit overkill. Just work on filling out the Pokedex, and in particular I recommend aiming for a Living Dex, where you have one of each Pokemon in your boxes. Then just keep in mind when playing through the game that its one of your objectives, even if its not your primary one.
Encountering a new Pokemon for the first time? Better catch it, you will need it for your Pokedex. In fact, catch 2 or 3 of them to make your life easier. Gotta have 1 of each stage after all.
One of your Pokemon is fully evolved? Well... keep using it! You are still trying to beat the game after all, and you wanna get some use out of the fully evolved ones and see how they work right?
Several of your Pokemon are fully evolved? Well now thats just wasting XP. You aren't gonna be using all of them. Might as well transfer a couple of them into the PC, and have some Pokemon you still need the evolutions for soak up the extra XP. Its not like you need more than 2 or 3 Pokemon to clear the game, right?
Pretty sure there are more pokemon in this area you are missing, but can't find them? Move on. This is just AN objective, not the only one. You will have the opportunity to come back and check later if you need to. Spend a bit of time in each area, catch what you can to fill your boxes, but don't worry about it too much.
Setup
Setup for this type of run is actually very easy, because its meant to be unintrusive. In fact. I HIGHLY recommend doing this for any run you do that doesn't have restrictions on catching Pokemon. It genuinely makes your life easier in the long run. Remember, this isn't about just making the game arbitrarily harder. Its about making your enjoyment of the game last longer. This helps a lot when you want to see how close you are to completion. First thing to do, as soon as you have access to your Boxes, is to rename them. Name each box as follows:- UNSORTED
- UNSORTED 2
- ...
- 1-30
- 31-60
- 61-90
- 91-120
- 121-150
- 151-180
- 181-210
- 211-240
- 241-270
- ...
- DLC1 1-30
- DLC1 31-60
- DLC1 61-90
- ...
- DLC2 1-30
- DLC2 31-60
- DLC2 61-90
- ...
- Forms 1
- Forms 2
- ...
- Shinies
- Alpha
- MISC
That is the setup I plan to use for PLZA, which is a modified version of the one I used in PLA, though in place of the DLC I had additional boxes for Alphas, and also included one for each of the Unown. You will likely need to make some tweaks on the fly. In the future I'll post the layout I use for Mainline games, as well as a spreadsheet link to actually track this if you would like to.
...
Thats it!
That's all the setup done! Well, mostly. Most games don't give you access to all your boxes at the start. So just name all the ones you can. Then just go out there and play normally, trying to complete your dex. Once you have filled up the first UNSORTED box (which all Pokemon should get sent to by default, because its the first box), then open up your boxes, and put a single Pokemon in every box. This will typically increase the number of boxes you have available.
From there, every now and then when your UNSORTED box fills, go into your box, look at each Pokemon. Modern games will typically have a Pokemon's regional dex number displayed when you move your cursor over it. Just pick it up, and drop it in the box with the range that number falls in. If you want to be a little bit neater, go through and count spaces to check where it would fall. For example, if you have a Pokemon who's dex number is 74, it would go in the 14th slot of the 61-90 box (row 3, column 2).
This will let you, at a glance, tell which Pokemon are missing that you still need to go out and collect, even if its already registered in the Pokedex. For example, if you only caught 2 Ralts, and have since evolved one into a Kirlia and one into a Gallade, you can at a glance tell that there is a gap before and after Kirlia, meaning you still need Gardevoir and Ralts, even though your Pokedex says you already have caught a Ralts.
Formatting my boxes this way was absolutely invaluable when completing my first Living Dex back in Pokemon Sword, and I cannot recommend it enough. It also greatly expanded the amount of playtime I got out of the games, as someone who isn't really interested in the tedious grind of shiny hunting.