How to Escape Lorelei's Game Ending Softlock 

This was supposed to come out weeks ago, and was meant to hold you all over until the next big video. So much for that. (◕ ‿ ◕✿ )

1 in 68 quindecellion chance. SO YOU'RE SAYING THERE'S A CHANCE.

"..The point is that I proved someone wrong on the Internet.." I'm subscribing just because this is the most honest statement I've ever seen on RU-vid.

Pokemon Red and Blue came out on September 28, 1998, and data suggests that a total of 31.38 million copies have been sold. If every copy of the game ever sold were put in this loop, and attempted to get out every five seconds since the games came out 22.5 years ago, odds are none of them would've missed more than six times by now.

Imagine getting Rage to miss 19 times in a row and then it hits the 20th time

Dewgong! I've come to bargain!

I live for insane calculations like these. That fact that there's even the most minuscule of chances to escape this fascinates me.

The second you said “If the move hits” I knew it was going to be the 256 glitch

Just to add to his statement about Rage only having 20 PP, if you used a PP Max to bring Rage's PP up to the max of 32, you would have roughly the same odds of encountering 20 shiny Pokemon in a row.

*Someone's voice: Don't run away!* Obviously that voice is inside Red's head as his sanity slowly crumbles. It's all he has now.

guy A: "i'm so lucky! i just encountered 12 shiny pokemon in a row!" guy B: "yea... my primeape is still stuck raging against lorelei"

I have never seen such determination and logic put into figuring out how to LOSE a battle. Kudos to you sir.

Fun fact: you're more likely to win the Powerball jackpot 5 times in a row than miss 20 Rages in a row.

“When am I ever going to use this math outside of school?” they said.

I'd take the 12 shinies rather than miss 20 rage

pointless old video game topics are my favorite videos though

I've looked into 68 quindecellion futures How many do we escape from? 1

"The point is, I proved someone wrong on the internet." LOL! That cracked me up!

Despite all my rage, I'm still just primeape on a stage.

The hardest part of becoming a programmer is looking back on childhood games like this and learning the abysmal AI behind what had been your greatest achievements.

I remember lying in bed one night thinking about escaping the Lorelei loop, and realizing you could go back to the Big Bang and attempt it (in real time) all the way up to the present day and probably still not get it. It genuinely gave me an anxiety attack.

I'm imagining Lorelei and Red trying to make conversation while this endless battle is going on.

I love how this guy just sounds like he hates his life in all these videos by torturing himself with pointless traps and grinding XD

I guess you could say that method would be quite *rage* inducing.

having a pretty much impossibly small chance is definitely worse than it being actually impossible. it's like a shimmer of dream and hope being crushed by the terrible reality of probability.

To anyone who still doesn't understand how unlikely it is to miss Rage 20 times in a row: The odds of winning the Powerball lottery are about 1 in 292 million. That's about 0.0000003%. The odds of winning the Powerball lottery 5 times in a row is about 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000469%. The odds of winning the Powerball lottery 5 times in a row are still about a million times greater than missing Rage 20 times in a row.

I wanna see someone create a room filled with computers all soft resetting at max speed, programmed to do this stunt That would be a world record "The most useless luck achievement on history"

I want to see a 24 hour stream of an AI attempting to miss rage 20 times in a row.

Tries to escape the trap Rage lands on the last PP point Congratulations, you've learned Rage!

I have a soft lock. Remove the game cartridge and discard it. You will be unable to progress or go backward.

Trapped in a room with Lorelei? Thats seems not bad.

Assuming that it takes 30 seconds to reload, start the battle, use rage, play out the animations, and check whether you hit or miss (n.b. it doesn't, but I'm being generous) the expected time it would take to reach that many trials before one of them gave you the desired result would be ~1.3E42 years (and this is just the average!). To put that into perspective, the universe is only ~1.4E10 years old. So while it is theoretically possible to escape this scenario (and this is also assuming perfect RNG, which the game boy most certainly doesn't have), it is for all practical purposes still impossible. Realistically the hardware would fry, or the player would die of old age before escaping.

The absolute best twist of the knife is something you almost mentioned when going over scientific notation - that the difference in E-notation is 2 orders of magnitude. You're not just more likely to get 12 shinies in a row than escape. You are **100 times more likely to.** EDIT: Thank God for comment chains. The actual factor is 16, not 100, but still - crazy odds.

In Yellow Version back when I was a kid my haunter was frozen from Lorelei I beat Bruno but only had two pokemon left had no healing items and when I went to Agitha I got her down to her last pokemon (gengar) with my non-frozen pokemon. Gengar took that one out leaving me with my frozen haunter. Gengar kept spamming hypnosis but because my haunter was frozen it would never work (in gen 1 frozen pokemon would not thaw out naturally) so I was stuck in an endless loop.

pikasprey noun 1) a person who derives sexual gratification from their own pain or humiliation. "the roles of pikasprey and mistress" 2) (in general use) a person who enjoys an activity that appears to be painful or tedious. "what kind of pikasprey would take part in such an experiment?"

What you do when you have to return a rented copy of the game

"I'm a cool guy. I've got a girlfriend!" Probably my favorite pre-battle trainer speech of all time.

If my math holds up, assuming 5 second turns and ignoring the time between a failed attempt and starting a new one, the average person would need in excess of 10^31 years to escape this softlock. Now, the problem with that is that this is about 1000 times longer than the time required for every star in every galaxy in the universe to fall into their central supermassive black holes. Indeed, the only stars left in the universe at that point would be stray brown dwarves. The variance here is insane as well, so even the smallest stroke of "bad" luck could have even the black holes begin to decay while you await your escape. Protons themselves will be falling apart, and yet that Dewgong will remain staring, taunting your soul through the eons with the promise of eventual escape. I think I'd rather just get stuck on Cinnabar Island thanks

I absolutely love how broken Gen 1 is

there has to be one kid on this earth who got their first pokemon game, and missed tackle the first 10 times they used it

I love how you are trapped by a combination of three glitches, but you *could* escape by the existence of a fourth glitch Gen 1 games are so broken…

And then we get into to argument of whether or not functional impossibility is equivalent to literal impossibility.

"The important thing is, I PROVED SOMEONE WRONG ON THE INTERNET!"

Hit or miss? I guess they Miss 0.3891% of the time.

20 years later: Finally rage missed 20 times! It took me forever! *Gameboy crashes*

I feel like with these tricks, and a bit of Rom hacking the first gen games could be great puzzle games. You start with like 4 items and a pokemon and have to "un-softlock" yourself.

The PeePee will not go down.

I watched my friend run into a shiny Pidgey in gen 2, kill it, and then he ran into another shiny pidgey directly afterwards. Their were no cheats used. It was the luckiest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. The odds of that happening are sooooooo low.

"some person" shows Crystal_ That's not just "some person"

I feel like the odds of somebody entering Lorelei's room under those conditions on accident are just as impossible as getting out. L

Anyone who missed rage 20 times Buy a lottery ticket.

I can confirm this I have been stuck battling the dewgong since 1996 :/

why is this so interesting??

I can actually make it alot easier. Gen 1 RNG is time based, so it would simply be a matter of Waiting the correct number of frames. A TAS could get out of it.

I haven't seen this comment yet so I'll say it. "1 in 68 quindecillion". So you're saying there's a chance!?

It might still be impossible depending on how the game's RNG works. If the RNG can't be manipulated into ever producing 20 misses in a row, then it's still impossible.

Maybe it's because im watching this at 5 am and sleep deprevation is getting to me, but this video not only made me anxious, but also completely horrified me. The thought of being stuck In some sort of infinite loop with seemingly no way to escape completely messed with my mind.

This video wasnt pointless because i heard you say "pee pee depleted"

Two things: 1. You could set Cinnabar Island as your respawn point, fly to the Indigo Plateau, release flying Pokemon, and once rage eventually misses 20 times in a row and KO’s itself, you’re stuck on Cinnabar. Bet you can’t escape that one. 2. “But the point is, I proved someone wrong on the internet.” Made me laugh out loud.

"but little did you know, I had nothing better to do today than find the most useless piece of Pokémon trivia ever" that line made my day. Thanks for finding useless things to make jokes about XD

One important question: does the game's RNG actually function in such a way that it can miss 20 times in a row? Depending on how RNG was implemented, it may not be possible due to the game running through a preset list of "random" results, with no possible method of manipulating the RNG to allow for 20 misses in a row. On the flip hand, if the RNG is manipulated by player input, a player aware of this could intentionally incur a miss every time in a TAS environment. I feel like you'd still need to prove the RNG allows for 20 misses in a row in the first place before you can definitively say this escape is possible.

New drinking game: Take a shot every time Pikasprey says "pp" or any number

3:35 So basically, the AI "could" spam their Super Powerful "should only have 5 or 8 depending on PP Ups used" Moves as many times as they like? Cheating assholes...

Ooh, I have an idea for a better softlock like this, that works against some other trainers as well. Just save in Lorelei's chamber with a frozen Pokémon as the only Pokémon in your party, and make sure to toss out any Full Restores, Full Heals, or Ice Heals before you do. Lorelei's Dewgong will indefinitely spam Rest per usual, and in Gen 1 you'll never unthaw without getting hit by a Fire-type move besides Fire Spin (which it doesn't have any), the opponent using Haze (which it also doesn't have), or using one of the aforementioned items. This also works for instance against Lance's Dragonite (though in that case since it isn't his first Pokémon, you need to bring another Pokémon and have it faint after using the move that takes out the Pokémon right before his Dragonite via recoil damage (burn and poison wouldn't work, since in Gen 1 if a burned or poison Pokémon faints a Pokémon it won't take damage from the status condition)) or even against Pokémon that don't know any damaging moves at all, such as Blue's Abra in the battle with him in Cerulean, or Sabrina's Abra in Yellow.

On the plus side, you'll have a looooong time to get to know Lorelei :D

Getting trapped by Lorelei is kind of fitting since she is named after a siren of german folklore who, sitting on the cliff above the Rhine and combing her golden hair, unwittingly distracted shipmen with her beauty and song, causing them to crash on the rocks. =)

All this talk of softlocks reminds me of Chrono Trigger's beginning softlock where you remove Marle from the accessible areas of the game, thus freezing the story and preventing any progress. FIVE MINUTES INTO A NEW GAME. Man, I love retro games.

I think the shiny example used in the video doesn't fully grasp how unlikely it is to miss 20 times in a row. Here's a better illustration: if there were a thousand universes like ours, and every star of every galaxy in each one of them was like Earth, and every human in every one of those Earths had been playing this scene on a thousand Gameboys for the entire existence of the universe there would be 0.1% chance that one of those tries resulted in Rage missing 20 times in a row. Yeah

I escaped three times in a row while jumping through burning rings on a unicycle with blindfolded eyes.

I did this more than 17 years ago and still remember it. Someone tricked me by saying I had to beat the 4 league members with pokemon that are less than level 15 in order to get a Mew but ended up being stuck in an endless loop where the Dewgong kept healing itself. I remember spending alot of time but eventually found a way to get the Dewgong to attack me by continuously switching between pokemon. I spent >3 hours to try to save my game but I guess if you only have 1 pokemon, thats not a plausible way to get out of the loop.

This happened to me once by accident when I was little. I went to challenge the Elite Four with a Poliwrath that knew Rage and it freaked me out when the game was stuck. 😂 (Thankfully I saved before entering, though!)

I just thought up of a very similar soft lock that I think is truly inescapable This only works in Pokemon Yellow Requirements: Have only a Normal/Flying Type with only Normal Type moves for dealing damage Don't have any items Steps: 1: With your Pokemon, challenge the Elite Four and defeat both Lorelei and Bruno 2: Once you get to Agatha's room, save your game 3: Congratulations, you just made an inescapable soft lock How this works: When battling Agatha, she will lead with Gengar with the moves Night Shade/Confuse Ray/Mega Drain/Substitute. Because both Night Shade and Confuse Ray are Ghost Type moves that have no effect on Normal Types and Mega Drain is a Grass Type move that is not very effective against Flying Types, the Gengar will do nothing but spam Substitute, doing no damage to you, and thanks to opponents in Gen 1 having infinite PP, there is no limit to how many times it can do this. Since Gengar is immune to all of your moves, you can't deal any damage to it either, and since Struggle is counted as a Normal Type move in Gen 1, Gengar is immune to that as well. The reason this doesn't work in Red/Blue is simple. Gengar's moveset in those games is Night Shade/Confuse Ray/Hypnosis/Dream Eater, meaning it actually can deal damage to you.

I love how gen 1 has so many design flaws

oh wow this video was amazing XD the time lost was 100% worth it

I feel sorry for the character in this video...imagine this: You're trapped in a room with a woman whom won't let you pass unless you win against her in a seemingly unwinnable pokémon battle. You can't go back the way you came since someone is barring the door and saying "Don't run away." at the same time he maniacally laugh. Your options are either bargain with Lorelei so she can actually use another pokémon instead of dewgong or outright let him pass or look at your Primeape and ask him to use Rage on yourself or itself to the point either you or Primeape itself faints and someone takes a pit on you and escort you out of this hellish-nightmare room. Or the 3rd option, just stare at Lorelei's ass until you pass out because you hadn't eaten for weeks. Nice stuff.

"I've used no peepee ups to raise the maximum peepee of my Primeape" Alright then.

I was super interested in reading the comments but at least half of them were people acting as a smart-ass that didn't even pay attention to the video. 1:42, friends. 1:42.

1 miss = 1 in 256 or 1 in 2^8. 20 misses = 1 in 2^(8*20) = 1 in 2^160 chance. PP UPped to 32 PP gives a 1 in 2^(8*32) = 1 in 2^256 chance. So basically the toughest and best encryption scheme in the world today, AES-256, with the known biclique attack, has about a 1 in 2^254 chance to be cracked through brute force and the best known method of attack. You are more likely to crack an AES-256 key than to miss 32 Rages in a row. Of course if you're on an emulator this is easy because we can RNG abuse the miss chance. Quite frankly if you tried this that many times on a real Gameboy, you have a bigger chance of getting out of there by some random RAM bit flip simply because the time you're spending in the game is over its error tolerance chance. But there's then the problem of the universe running out of energy before you're done with even a tiny fraction of attempts.

A fifth glitch actually makes this escape much more likely. According to the list of gen 1 glitches, if rage does miss in battle, its accuracy goes from 255/256 to 1/256 for the rest of the battle, meaning the chance of being able to lose is actually (1/256)((255/256)^19) which is much more likely then the original (1/256)^20

I saw this video and immediately after saw the one about locking yourself in Cinnabar Island so I thought I'd comment something neat you can do there. In Cinnabar Island there is a girl NPC that is just below the Mansion and the Gym, and just above an old man. This girl only walks horizontally and is at a vertical distance of two steps from the entrance of the Gym. If the door to the Gym is locked, standing in front of it triggers a text box saying something like "The door is locked" and pushes the character back one step. If one stands to the left of the girl NPC and walks to the right, she can be pushed two tiles beneath the Gym door. Saving at that point and walking up to the door will (temporarily, I think?) lock you in a loop. I know there were ways to get out of it, like soft resetting obviously, and some other ways, although I did this so long ago I can't remember. It'd be great if someone could test it.

Hrm... it is worth noting that Pokemon uses a pseudorandom number generator for producing these values, and as such, there is a finite number of random seeds, and each one produces a finite number of "cycles" of values. That is to say, you can't infinitely generate random numbers; there has to be a point where you start seeing repeats. It may be the case that there is no seed which contains a cycle with 20 consecutive 255 values. In which case, despite your solution seeming plausible on paper, it does not work on actual hardware.

Impressive you probably did more math than what you ever used in high school and cracked down on logic more than what you would do on the LSAT

A softlock from a design oversight... saved by another design oversight.

Thanks for helping me with my math homework

So you're saying there is a chance?

THE PEE PEE WILL NOT GO DOWN

This man looked in the face of God, bit the fruit of knowledge, and moonwalked backward into hell

Brilliant.

My name is Crystal, so that was quite startling to hear me get congratulated for something I didn't do

Well now, should missing 20 times in a row a move that can never fail, be considered extremely lucky or extremely unlucky?

The pettiness of this is why I’m subscribed

"There are less planets in the universe than that," my brother upon seeing the chance of 20 rage misses in a row.

Before another goddamn guy says "old rod": 1:42

When I was a kid I thought the guy in front of cerulean cave had a tall Afro.

The video that started an entire genre. Good for you, Pikasprey.

How often does Pokemon call its RNG function? Because this theoretical escape might actually still be impossible. Lemme explain with some examples... So most of us know by now that video games don't have COMPLETELY random number generators, they have pseudo-random. They use "seeds" and lists of upcoming random numbers with a limited number of possible repeats. They aren't truly random from a technical standpoint, but they are close enough that players will never notice. And as a side effect, generating a value of 255 twenty consecutive times is often not just statistically unlikely but literally impossible, especially in older 8-bit and 16-bit, even 64-bit games Then we have the issue of how often the list I mentioned is updated and the seed tasked with refilling that list. In some games, the RNG never generates a new value until the game specifically asks for it. In Super Mario 64, for example, if you stand perfectly still in the castle hubworld, the RNG will never be called, cycled, updated, or incremented. Other games, on the other hand, do cycle their RNGs or at least call their seed to refill the list even if seemingly sitting idle (I can't find any examples but I have seen a thread where programmers criticized these games for setting themselves up for all kinds of desync errors). Bringing this back to Pokemon, this softlock is only escapable if it's physically possible to get an RNG call of 255 twenty times. This might not be possible, depending on whether sitting at your fight menu for 20 minutes resets the RNG table or not. Because I HIGHLY doubt that it's possible to get a single RNG table containing the numbers {255, 34, 255, 176, 255, 90, 255, 78, 255...}. I expect you would have to make the game refresh the table every turn until you get another 255

That was utterly pointless. I just subscribed.

Nidoking was an absolute beast in the original games. I mean like, sheer-fucking-apocalyptic force.

With emulator savestates, you can save every time it hits, and reset whenever it misses. So the chance becomes 1/5120 (5120 is 20*256.)

I thought there was another design flaw that made it so if rage misses then the next time you use it it only has a 1/256 of hitting make it easier to get out of this softlock