LogFAQs > #961895139

God...dammit.

I was working on leveling my team to 55 (I go in five-level chunks), and I'd gotten through most of my low-tier Pokemon and was only my upper echelon. And I'm down to my last three: Violeta, Rafael, and Shay. Everyone else is 55 and I've swapped some of the lower-tier guys into the rotation. Now, because I have a trio with Water and Ground attacks, I've swapped back to fighting Gravelers and Houndooms. But I don't want to send Violeta out first, because I'm terrified of Stone Edge. So I'm using Rafael. And he's doing fine. He's got Giga Drain to heal up on Gravelers (I know his attack stat is better, but against Gravelers, a high power special attack is still 4x effective), and is basically chugging along great.

So I wind up fighting a Houndoom, and this WHOLE time, I've been operating under the assumption that Rafael's Ground-typing would cancel out his Grass-typing to make Fire attacks neutral. I was wrong about this. We're at the level where Houndoom naturally learns Flamethrower, and Rafael is slow as fuck, so he moves second, gets blasted by a critical hit Flamethrower, and survives with 5 HP. And then the burn hits. I then had to watch and PRAY that Earthquake would OHKO this Houndoom, but the burn condition was JUST enough to lower my attack so I didn't get the kill. And despite Rafael being my starter and having all those "Rafael looks at you expectantly" friendship actions, he did not power out of the burn. Nope, the burn dropped him to zero, and I lost my started Pokemon.

The sad thing is that I was literally thinking to myself, how in my previous attempts at Nuzlockes, my starter is lucky to make it to level 20. I have a history of my starter getting blasted by a crit, or me thinking they're just a lot stronger than they really are. But now, after almost fifty levels, he doesn't get to make it to the endgame. He doesn't get to square off against Cynthia. The massive wipeout of six Pokemon from my last update is NOTHING compared to losing Rafael. RIP Rafael (Level 5-53).

I'll say one thing though. Between my Pearl Nuzlocke and my normal Diamond run, I specifically went into these remakes, wanting to use Torterra, since I'd never done so before. And if I'm being honest, it didn't impress me all that much. I mean, sure, it gets Earthquake really early. But until that point, you get no Ground-type attacks by level. And despite having a stronger physical attack stat than special, it does not learn a physical Grass-type attack after level 13, with Razor Leaf. How the hell does this NOT naturally learn Seed Bomb? Because it's not like you can just pop a physical Grass TM on it. Despite my current sadness over losing a long-term survivor...I'm not coming out of this playthrough thinking any more positively about Torterra. It still stands out as being FAR inferior to its starter counterparts.