Wa! Wa!

love my pumpkin

a video titled 'Can you beat Pokémon Ruby with only LANDORUS?'. I see the title and say to my wife 'it would be kind of funny if the answer was just "no, because Landorus isn't in pokemon ruby"'.

my expectation, to be clear, is that this is someone modding pokemon ruby to include Landorus and then doing a solo playthrough in the manner of any number of other pokemon challenge youtubers. My wife and I have an extended discussion about which pokemon you would expect to have problems soloing an entire main series pokemon game, assuming you hacked them in as a starter and allowed HM mons that don't participate in fights.

I notice the length of the video. It's 28 seconds long. I think to myself "wait, is it really just that joke?". I do not click on the video. I put the matter out of my mind until the next day, when I see it again.

Curiosity gets the better of me. I click through to the channel, "Impossible Game Challenges Daily"

someone has been posting a video every day with the title "Can you beat Pokémon Ruby with Only X?" for every pokemon, in pokedex order. As far as I can tell (I haven't sampled that many videos), almost all of them are near identical: A voiceover starts narrating the premise of the challenge over the first few bits of gameplay (sped up), until they reach the starter selection screen. The voiceover tells us: "Everything goes pretty well at first, but we run into a slight problem when we have to choose our starter. It turns out X is not actually an option in this game. Looks like this challenge is impossible."

The audio is the same for every video, with just the pokemon name very obviously edited in. every pokemon is declared to be the author's favourite pokemon.

there are compilation videos for all the kanto, johto, hoenn, and sinnoh pokemon. the unova one will be releasing soon!

(you might have the obvious follow-up question: since every challenge is declared impossible at the starter selection screen, what are the videos for treecko, torchic, and mudkip like? well, they are slight deviations from the formula, although still about half a minute in length. torchic and treecko declare the challenge is impossible because you need surf to progress and neither of them can learn it. mudkip declares the challenge impossible because at the weather institute you are given a castform, and so your party isn't just mudkip)