Nuzlocke

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Combine the retardation of the Pokémon series with the pointlessness of self-imposed video game challenges, and what do you get? Nuzlocke, alternately known as The Nuzlocke Challenge! This Crap phenomenon/meme/whatever the fuck started, as most do, on 4chan, specifically the /v/ board.

Origins

	“	Nuzlocke is stupid	„
	— TopGoogle search suggestion for “Nuzlocke is...”

All the way back in 2010, a lazy-ass college kid was fiddling with his Game Boy one day when he thought up an extremely original way to make his game harder. He decided to A) Consider a Pokémon dead and release it if it faints for any reason, and B) To only catch the first wild Pokémon encountered in each area of the game and nothing else. Besides making the game slightly more difficult to complete, it actually made him care more about the monsters he captured, even the ones that most other players consider crap. Wanting to share his tale with the Internet, said college kid posted a handful of shit-tier webcomics on /v/ about playing through Pokémon Ruby with this ruleset, under the username "Nuzlocke". He called his abomination "Ruby: Hard Mode. All the virgins on /v/ pretended to like it, and Nuzlocke, being too stupid to understand the concept of sarcasm, continued posting his story. He eventually attracted people who actually liked the concept, and the world mourned (see "Fan Runs" below).

WTF does "Nuzlocke" mean?

See, it's called a Nuzlocke because Nuzlocke posted the original Nuzlocke with a character called Nuzlocke.. ah, for fuck's sake.

Let's try to break this down as painlessly as possible:

Nuzlocke, as in, the neckbeard who posted the original comic series to /v/, fashioned his username after the Seedot that was his first catch in the game, not counting his starter Treecko. In the third episode and onward of Ruby: Hard Mode, Seedot is almost always drawn with the face of John Locke from the TV show Lost, which Nuzlocke (the neckbeard) claims he was obsessed with at the time he was creating the comic. Seedot evolves into a Pokémon called Nuzleaf, and that's where the name comes from: Nuzleaf+Locke. Nuzleaf then died like 2 episodes later, however the fans loved the Nuzleaf so much that Nuzlocke kept it as a regular character. Interestingly, this Pokémon was never actually named "Nuzlocke" in the comic, and the main character simply called him by his species name. (Of course, that doesn't stop all the fans of the series from calling the Nuzleaf "Nuzlocke" anyway.

Rules of Nuzlocke Runs

MANDATORY RULES:

• If a Pokémon faints for any reason, it is considered dead and must be released forever. Some casual noobs instead choose to put them in the PC storage box permanently.

• You can only catch the first wild Pokémon you encounter in each area (Route, town, whorehouse, etc.) and nothing else. If you run away or you accidentally kill it in self-defense, too bad, no catch for that area.

RULES THAT AREN'T MANDATORY BUT MOST PEOPLE DO THEM SO THEY MIGHT AS WELL BE:

• You have to nickname every Pokémon you get so that your heart is broken even more when they inevitably die.

• The "Shiny Clause": If you encounter a sparkly and alternately-colored Pokémon, you can catch and use it even if it wasn't the first thing you saw in the area, on account of how fucking rare those things are.

• No trading Pokémon or Eggs or any of that shit from other people or from yourself.

RULES THAT MAKE IT HARDER:

• No healing at Pokémon Centers, only healing with healing potions and other items.

• No healing with items, only healing at Pokémon Centers. It is not advised that you combine this rule with the one directly above.

• No buying items from shops, only using ones that you find lying on the ground.

• The Duplicates (or just "Dupes" Clause: If the first Pokémon you see in an area is one that you've already caught before, you can skip it and catch the next new one you find. Extremely exploitable.

• The "Notepad Clause", named after Notepad, a popular member of the Nuzlocke Forums, mentioned below: You can't switch Pokémon out of your party unless they die, and you can't catch any more 'mons once your party is full. Doing this basically leads to a team full of early-game 'mons, adding to the challenge and fun.

Sweet baby Jesus, how did this crap become popular?

As already stated, nobody who Nuzlocke claims liked his comic on /v/ actually liked it. It wasn't until he continued spamming 4chan with updates that he attracted the attention of people stupid enough to enjoy it. This includes general PokéFags, as well as fanfiction writers that saw the opportunity for an easy story full of actual death to base a fanfic on and they all shat their pants in joy.

It's progressed to the point that Reddit, /vp/, and DeviantART, among others, have rather large fanbases of Nuzlocke players, like a sooty grey tumor on the anus of the Web.

Some of the appeal comes from people who are sick of min/maxing competitive Pokémon players and Smogfags, and see this as some sort of low-key rebellion against competitive players. Statistics have determined that competitive players don't give a Raticate's ass about this.

However, the true secret of the appeal of The Nuzlocke Challenge is much more sinister: It's addictive. Yes, you read that right. Once you start a Nuzlocke run in a game and learn how to play with the extra rules, it's impossible to go back to playing the games normally again (but you don't play them anyway, right?). Whenever you try to play Pokémon in the future, you find yourself unable to capture more than one 'mon per Route. You gain the urge to part with your Pokémon when they faint. You begin to sweat. You don't know what's going on. You realize you'll never be able to rejoin proper society again. So you join the Nuzlocke Forums and find other like-minded sympathizers. And you relax. You have the sensation of being among friends, even though it's really more like sitting in a circle of dirty Mexicans at a local AA meeting, where you're all doing shots of spiked punch out of Dixie cups.

Fanbase

After the flood of fan fiction writers and furfags started actually liking Ruby: Hard Mode, Nuzlocke's head went straight up his own ass and he took it upon himself to make his own website to host the comics, as well as a pair of other ones that he collaborates on with his fellow aspies. (Though some people believe he only did this because Moot was about to perma-ban him for posting shit that not even 4chan wants. He then took it a step further and made his own goddamn FORUM so that his "fans" can discuss his comics and share their own Nuzlocke runs. Most of them suck goat balls, not surprising considering the example they have to follow.

99% of the early fan runs were comics, in an attempt to emulate the success of the original Ruby: Hard Mode, but in recent times they have thinned out due to comics being too much fucking work for the newer generation of fans. There is now a fairly even balance between comics, story or diary-esque written runs, screenshot runs with or without plot, and alternative runs that don't fit into any category at all (musical runs, written logs, etc.) Strangely enough, there are a lot of female Nuzlocke players, probably because “Pokémon with permadeath” is the extent of difficulty in video games that women can handle.

Especially when the phenomenon first started, a lot of the fan-made challenges were actually somewhat decent. But because we can't have nice things, the quality of these creations is balanced out by the fact that they DON'T FUCKING CONTRIBUTE ANYMORE. Leading to this:

Fan runs that are pretty good but don't fucking update anymore

• Hale: His Emerald comic run was one of the first actually good Nuzlocke fan runs (at least until the original thread got filled with spam about his yandere interpretation of May and the mods had to permaban all of his fans). Got extremely butthurt after nobody cared about his Platinum playthrough and an hero'd.
• PettyArtist: A widely loved (mostly because she's a girl) comic artist, her LeafGreen playthrough gained wide acclaim for being better illustrated and having a better story than Nuzlocke's FireRed. Especially loved was her character "Rick" the Electrode, and the world mourned when he was killed by Gary late in the comic (spoilers by the way). Riding on this success, Petty continued her saga by beginning a HeartGold comic, when she suddenly stopped posting after the third Gym. People thought that maybe she killed herself like Hale did, but posts on her Youtube showing her dicking around with her pet birds instead of drawing her damn comic proved otherwise. And then, to everybody's great joy, Petty posted again in the HeartGold topic in April 2013, saying that the next update was finally finished! HUZZAH! Oddly, there were two links. One led to a short comic, and the second led to a Youtube video. In the comic, her female main character named Locke who prefers wearing boy's clothing is walking down a road, then suddenly she(?) hears music from behind. In the video, she(?) realizes that the noise is coming from her beloved Electrode, Rick! Locke expresses great joy at seeing Rick alive, and then.. well.... You really have to see it to believe it. Needless to say, massive butthurt occurred amongst the fan base that couldn't take a fucking joke, and Petty continued to not post anything related to the comic for the lulz.

And then she did post more stuff like five fucking months later. But it was bad because she used artistic license to make her Pokémon evolve earlier than they actually did.

• Notepad: A Britfag who drew a Pokémon Gold comic that nearly matched the shittyness of Nuzlocke's Ruby run. Obviously, everybody loved it. He did get a bit better over the course of the comic, even implementing short (terribad) Flash video segments for important parts of the story, like when his Raticate dies (oh, yeah, spoiler alert) or when he wins The Game. After his fanboys were done spunking themselves over his Gold comic, he started a comic for Blue version, establishing himself once and for all as a massive oldfag who doesn’t know about any Pokémon games released after 2001. Amazingly, Notepad was actually able to prevent his Raticate from dying this time! More amazingly, he didn’t fall into the second-run trap that killed off the two other fags above, and finished his Blue comic. Drunk with power and greedy for more readers, Notepad started a run of Pokémon White. However at this point, people realized that he was intentionally copying Nuzlocke by making his second comic set in Kanto with [b]slightly[/b] less shit art, and his third comic set in Unova in full-color. So everybody stopped caring, and Notepad decided to take his shekels and his crumpets and run.

Oh yeah, and his Gold comic was the first time anybody used the crappy ruleset of “no adding Pokémon to your team once the party’s full”, and people liked the idea for some reason.

• Pencil: A more recent addition to the D-Bag brigade, Pencil began her(?) foul-mouthed journey across Pokémon LeafGreen to the great acclaim of many people, who enjoyed her comic because of the 2EDGY4ME protagonist and the great use of facial expressions. Weaboos everywhere jizzed themselves over the relationships between the Pokémon, especially between a Sandslash named Dallas and a Weepinbell called Jade, who pretty much just have a stereotypical “love-hate” relationship, but the brainless sheep who read Pencil’s comic don’t really care. She then stopped posting abruptly at a fucking cliffhanger as to whether or not Jade dies. Combined with Petty’s Rickroll (above), Pencil proves once and for all that female Nuzlockers are some of the biggest trolls in the world.
• PaperMonkey: After the mods work hard on bringing back the Featured Fan Runs portion of the forum, and after P.M. has the honor of being the first featured creator, she abruptly stops updating her comic. And nothing of value was lost.

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