Gen 5 Blazeblack Battlegirl Bravado!

I haven't played a documented challenge run in ages and I was in a gen 5 mood. At @DoctorAlakazam 's suggestion I will be playing Blazeblack for the first time sooooo this is going to be a blind run!

The randomly selected theme for this run is Battle Girl. This on the bright side, gives me joy with the alliteration it provides with the name of the game. On the dark side... that is a lot of overlapping weaknesses. This is going to be a tough challenge but we can make it work!

So starting off here is the template for this run.

Pretty good with Rush's nature and had no issues tackling the rivals into the floorboards of my room.

EDIT: Blaze Black has modified typings for some Pokémon so you may see some surprise catches. I will post their updated type as they come up. The Emboar line becomes Fire/Ground instead of Fire/Fighting by the end so that's neat.

 

oh dannnng

 

Blazeblack itself is just a rebalanced, edited version of the normal Black game. More Pokémon, bigger trainer variety etc. The ruleset I am running is just a self-imposed set of rules I am using for this run.

 

Welp today's update is.... well more of the same. I had a technical issue with my DS emulator and it corrupted my save. Reset everything but I had to start from scratch so here is the current team while I am figuring out the first gym. Blazeblack is quite a bit harder than the regular games, the first gym is a rotation battle that I really don't want to go into with 2 mons...



Good news is, Rush got an even better nature and Magnum is a better nature than the first Mankey I got pre-corruption.

 

I have decided to update the types to include the ground type. This is to enable me to have a legal trio for the rotation battle of the first gym. I also figured it suited the overlapping weaknesses I have going. So digging around the Dreamyard I found our newest team member Joker the Nidoran.

Spent some time catching him up to the rest of the team and evolving him into a Nidorino. With our intrepid trio ready, we stepped into the fancy restaurant that serves as the Striaton city gym and challenged Cress to a Rotation battle. The battle was tough but having Magnum with Defiant saved the day. She took a Screech from Piplup early on and got her attack boosted high enough to destroy most of our opponents. Its a good thing too, what I thought was just going to be 3 water starters in a rotation battle ended up being 6 mons total. I am just glad he didn't invest in training their speed too much.

After healing up from the gym we were dragged back out to the Dreamyard and fought off some jerks from Team Plasma. Spammed B on Fennel's crazy tech talk and finally gained access to the next grass patch on route 3. Postponed saving a child's Pokémon to check for a valid encounter in the grass before the cave and found a new buddy now nicknamed Meatball. Very happy with my choice to add ground types to this little party. Here is the team as we enter Wellspring cave:

 

Chasing after Plasma grunts we found our most rough and tumble lil fella: The Hammer. I don't think I have ever raised a Roggendola so this should be fun.

Aaaannd we have had our first death. The adorable Meatball fell at the hands of a mean Geodude that just hated us. Sturdied a water pulse, got confused, broke through confusion and retaliated with a Magnitude 10 that actually koed Shellos almost from full.

Running around the grass in front of Pinwheel forest we did find a new team member, Rampage the Machop! Very happy he ended up with a good nature and that we got a pure fighting type. Grass and Water types are really scary this run

 

Did a bunch of training using the ever helpful nurse NPCs (I really want them in more games, so nice for grinding). Felt about ready to head into the second gym. Normal types can't be so bad right?

Gym trainers went well, between the wall that is The Hammer and the fighting moves that everyone is packing things were going well. Then I got to Lenora.

Battle type for this gym is Doubles which is easier for my brain than rotation but man its a lot harder for a challenge run. Juggling status, health and defenses for 2 mons at a time made things tricky but we prevailed. Not without a casualty though, Magnum the bad ass lil Mankey lady fell to Lenora's Bouffalant. I did not expect Aerial Ace from it, that hit a lot harder than expected. Thankfully everyone else made it, though some were very close calls. Her Moody Bibarel was a scary beast (with Furret taking hits away via Follow Up).

Now heading into the Pinwheel forest and looking for our next team mate...