Soft Lock Picking: Level 100 Gengar Takes Days to Escape Battle 

“There is an incredible oversight in gen 1 battle mechanics that is actively working against us” is a sentence that is applicable in any situation in those games

The trainer saying "There aren't many bugs here" right as you perform an exploit in front of their eyes at 1:21 is comedy gold

A small tweak: Leave only a burn heal in their inventory, as another insult on top of this.

You've got to give it to that Youngster Trainer, he's got the determination and patience to sit there for days whittling down a gang of gengars for probably just bragging rights.

When you added five more Gengars I gasped, this is so brutal I love it.

You know, if the opponent's PP did decrease this would really be inescapable. In Gen 1, Struggle doesn't affect Ghost Types.

Could you imagine this battle happen in the lore? A couple of kids locked in battle for not hours but DAYS would attract people for sure xD The spectators would be like "Whoa! That frozen Gengar finally fainted for what seemed like years... YOU WHAT?? YOU HAVE ANOTHER SLAB OF ICE WITH A GENGAR IN IT??!"

Pikasprey: "Hey kid, you want a level 100 Gengar?" Kid: "Boy, would I! Thanks, mister!" Pikasprey: "Heh. Sucker..."

Don't forget, even if you WANTED to sit through this battle, you couldn't on the original Gameboy and Gameboy Color systems. Their battery lives were ~15 and ~10 hours, respectively. You can't swap out for new batteries without the system turning off, which would reset your progress in the battle, since you can't save the game. On the original consoles, this would effectively soft-lock your game (unless you had some fancy extra-life batteries or something).

If you get a Gengar with an HP DV of 15 and max out it's HP Stat Exp, it will have 323 HP. This will make the battle approximately 33% longer than with your set up.

This is literally the opening scene of R/B/Y and FR/LG, but remade to be as sadistic as possible. I'm starting to think Pikasprey is the real monster here...

And that isn't even a max HP Gengar or anything either. With perfect stats and stat experience, the Gengar(s) in question would have 323 HP, requiring 33% more crits.

Now I want to see tool-assisted speedruns picking all of Pikasprey's scenarios

You have no idea the joy I feel in my heart whenever I get a notification for one of these videos.

9:54 "Imagine the most horrible, terrifying, evil thing you could possibly think of, and multiply it... by six!" - Megamind

1:21 "There aren't many bugs out here" Asprey, admit it. You chose that line specifically because you know there are indeed very many bugs in Gen 1.

there's also no way a gameboy's battery could run the game for that long. the save would be unsavagable on real hardware

If the level 100 Gengar all had perfect IV’s and DV’s, that might make it even less likely for the Poison Sting to hit and would take drastically longer

I know that eventually we'll run out of ideas for SoftLock Picking, but until then, I love these videos!

My favorite part about this video series is that the situations aren't inescapable. Gives you just enough hope to see it through.

As soon as I saw the opponent was a Nidoran, I figured out how messed up this battle was. Great use of the 0 damage "miss" mechanic and the trainer fly glitch! Never thought to save right before a battle

imagine being the npc in this. some guy challenges you to a battle, and forces you to spend over a day fruitlessly chipping away at his frozen pokemon.

I haven't played theses games in over 20 years, but I always love to see him break them.

Gen 1 freeze mechanics were already horrendous, but this really takes it to another level. Well done, Asprey, well done.

I'm still frozen. Plz help.

Pikasprey: “Hello RU-vid and welcome back to another video!” Also Pikasprey: *Cries inside after soft locking his save file after 70 hours of play*

And when the world needed him most, he returned. Welcome back, King Christian, you were missed.

This softlock would be actually inescapable if the enemy pokemon had PP because in gen 1 struggle is treated as a normal move, so it can't hit ghosts and poison sting only has like 35 PP so it would be impossile to deal enough damage to KO Gengar.

Yeah, I've seen the 0-damage thing before, I think while using a Venusaur against an Oddish that was at a low level, who "missed" with its Absorb. Very interesting how you can create a situation that can take literally several days to escape with this oddity. Hope your Game Boy's batteries can last long enough!

In terms of the probability of progressing: There's a 25% chance for the opponent to use a move that can deal damage (poison sting) x ~9.77% chance to land a critical hit (because in gen 1 the crit rate is BaseSpeed/512, and Nidoran-M has a base Speed of 50) = 2.44% chance of the opponent dealing *1* damage each turn. And this Gengar has 242 HP.

Here's a way to make it even more evil: Make it a shiny Gengar that was traded from Gen 2 (it wouldn't show up as shiny here, obviously, but it would stay shiny when traded back). That way, they have to get through the battle to be able to retrieve it.

Quick oversight Since starting the game puts you in the fight and stops you from going into options, you can't set battle effects to off or speed to fast. You can be stuck on slow textboxes and with battle effects on :)

If this is done on official Gameboy hardware, this setup actually is impossible to escape from if six gengars are involved. the reason for this is that a Gameboy's battery life on four AA batteries is at most 30 hours, so even in the generous scenario presented, the Gameboy would _literally run out of power from a full charge_ before one could become within ten hours of escaping. Nasty stuff! Edit: I think people are skipping the whole “gameboy” part of the “official gameboy hardware” part. Yes, of course on a gba or on stadium or anything with different battery life, or no sense of battery at all, this is possible to do. I’m merely saying that on a real original gameboy, *unless you have a charging cable,* this isn’t possible. A charging cable indeed allows for you to suffer your practically two full days uninterrupted :D

The zero damage glitch is especially obscure because even if you saw it, you'd most likely think it was the much more infamous 1/256 glitch.

This particular softlock feels almost evil, lol! And I'm just imagining the situation where the person finally gets out of the battle and ends up running into another trainer right after or something! Thanks for the really neat explanation of unique pokemon mechanics, love your videos!

"Boy i sure do love my 6 Gengar, I sure hope nothing bad happens to them."

Time to do some maths to calculate how long (on average) the battle would last, in turns. Now, we know that the probability Nidoran will use Poison Sting is 1/4. We also know that the only way for Poison Sting to deal damage to Gengar is for it to be a critical hit. But how likely is a critical hit in this case? In Gen I, critical hit chances are based on the user's base speed - in this case, the Nidoran's base speed is 50. In most cases, with this being no exception, for an attack to deal a critical hit, a generated random number for the attack (between 0 and 255) must be less than half the base speed of the user. In other words, there is a 25 in 256 chance that the Poison Sting attack will deal damage to the Gengar. All-in-all, the chances of Gengar being damaged in each turn is 25/1024, or approximately 2.44%. Another fact to note is that the max HP of your Gengar will vary from run to run (due to EVs and IVs), with a minimum of 230 HP and a maximum of 324 HP. For this I will calculate the battle lengths for two instances - that of a single 242 HP Gengar (as shown in the video), and that of six 324 HP Gengars, for anyone willing to put in the time to make an absolutely dastardly save file. To calculate the battle length, we need to use logarithms (scary, I know). For any event with a probability P to succeed, the average number of tries taken for the event to succeed is log(1/2) / log(1 - P). So, the average number of turns for Gengar to take 1 HP of damage is log(1/2) / log(1 - 25/1024), or about 28 turns, more specifically 28.043... turns. Taking into account the 1/256 miss glitch, this rises slightly to 28.155... turns. Remember though that this is saying that it takes on average 28 turns to deal *a single point of damage* to Gengar. For the full battle length, we need the attack to succeed many, many times. To calculate this, we just take the value we just calculated and multiply it by the max HP and number of Gengars. For a single 242 HP Gengar, the battle would last on average 6,813 turns. For six 324 HP Gengars, the battle would last a gruelling 54,732 turns. But that's if you had average luck. What if you had worse than average luck with six 324 HP Gengars? In that case there would be: - A 25% chance your battle would last at least 109,465 turns - A 10% chance your battle would last at least 181,817 turns, and - A 1% chance your battle would last at least 363,635 turns. Using an average turn length of about 2.33 seconds (going from the in-game footage), the average battle length with a single 242 HP Gengar is around 4 hours and 24 minutes. For six 324 HP Gengars, the average battle will last 35 hours and 25 minutes. If you had worse luck, there is a 1% chance that battle would still be going after almost 10 days.

At this point I'm just waiting for you to figure out a way to not only soft lock the game but also find a way to not even allow a new game to be started.

This is a very winter-themed Lock...I sure felt frozen when I was heading out today...

I was half expecting him to cut to a point in the video where he showed off ONE gengar being defeated and then showing off the party of gengar

I'm always amazed at the sheer number of ways you can trap yourself (infinitely, or for a VERY long time, or in one instance, trapped infinitely unless you want to give up your shiny) in these games. I can't get enough of these videos, keep up the good work.

Great video, unfortunately I can't watch the full thing because the Eterna Forest theme always makes me cry. Incredibly beautiful track with many nostalgic memories attached :/

Pikasprey's softlocks give me the same vibe as the Minecraft prison community.

He can’t keep getting away with this! *HE CAN’T KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH THIS!*

It would be interesting if you could get a reaction of others opening up the softlock with no context.

Bro. I played Pokemon all the way into my childhood . All these are so fucking funny and petty. I love it.

i love watching these videos because it makes me feel like a supervillain in training

Wait, remember the old Lorelei softlock? Would it be possible to make it a TRUE softlock if you used a FROZEN fighting type instead of one that has to rely on Rage?

This is absolute pure evil and I am disgusted. I’m doing this to one of my friends immediately

Never stop making these videos, this series is genuinely so fascinating

Days of being forced to look at that atrocious backsprite. This truly is brutal.

to make it truly evil lock the last pokemon center on cinnebar island, 48 hours of dying with 6 gengars and then you realized that you are 100% stuck

2:16 "there aren't many bugs out here" oh, i beg to differ

This is so evil, the battle went back in time to become the opening cutscene and transcended beyond generations and the anime.

It's sad that even if it could eventually struggle, it wouldn't even affect gengar

Hear me out... what if... you did all of this but also put the characters poke center on cinnabar, got rid of fly, surf, etc and then it wouldn't be removable at all? The player would spend all this time to die and then be stuck on an island for the rest of their life of save file lol

This would be straight up impossible on anything besides a GBA SP, since there’s no way that a set of AA batteries would last long enough to see the end of this battle.

I would actually like to watch a video with that softlock in action. Maybe with 6 Gengars, an emulator sped up and with a keyboard macro.

The visual must be so funny, a tiny purple rinocerous running into a giant purple block of ice, repeatedly, for over 100 hours.

Chef’s kiss. You’ve outdone yourself, pilasprey. You’re a sick demented person and I love you.

Babe wake up, it's a Pikasprey upload!

Don't worry, we just gotta wait until that Nidoran evolves into Nidorino so it can throw hands with Gengar properly, like in the Kanto openings

Dealing 0 damage is actually quite common when you're fighting mons over level 100

From what I am able to calculate, the nedoran has a ~2.43%, chance to do damage. There is a 1/4 that the correct move is chosen, then a 25/256 that Nidoran gets a crit (Because crits are based on a Pokemon's base speed in gen 1), and lastly 255/256 chance that the 1 in 256 glitch doesn't happen. All of this comes out to getting hit about once every 41 turns. Doing 1 damage per hit and assuming about 5 seconds per turn, this would be getting hit once every 205 seconds or just shy of 3 and half minutes. So for 1 Gengar you are looking at about 13 hours and 46 minutes or for all six about 82 hours and 41 minutes. I always enjoy when you upload these kind of videos. Thank you so much.

Fun fact: in gen 2, it is also possible to be thawed by Tri Attack at a 1/3 chance

Remember that the gbc have batteries that last ~10 hours so 2 gengar are enough to be unpickable.

Nearly the entire video I kept thinking “why stop at 1 Gengar? What about 6 frozen Gengar?” And then you said it and I was so happy

Waking up to see your save file like this is a way to make you forever frightened by Gengar. Especially R/B sprite Gengar.

Great way to start off my ‘friday’, cheers man. Wish I had the time to show up for your streams live

I think the only way to break the soft lock with legitimate hardware would be to use the cartridge with the N64 Transfer Pak and Pokemon Stadium 1 or 2. The GameBoy's batteries would die and you'd have to start all over again.

"Up until now, I've only been using *one* Gengar." _oh god_ i didn't even consider this I only wish there was some way to make the save file particularly attractive to salvage instead of just immediately starting over! My only thought was having some kind of rare shiny Pokémon... You could get a frozen shiny Zapdos in the party, but I can't think of a way to convey that to the player given that, you know, it's a Gen 1 game (and these save files are always way more interesting when they speak for themselves)! And besides, even if you were given context for the awful save file you were given, being told "hey, that zapdos is DEFINITELY shiny if you trade it out of gen 1, just mash this button for 50 hours and you'll see!" kinda asks for a LOT of trust!

"Remember kid, DO NOT START A FIGHT THAT YOU CANNOT FINISH" Probably Pikasprey to that poor youngster

Interesting, I didn’t know about the 0% damage mechanic in gen 1.

hey man i just wanna say that i loved your soft locking series, its very well thought, planned and also very well executed in the most fun way, hoping to see more in the future

This is the simplest, yet most diabolical one of these you've done.

Wow, I had no idea you couldn't thaw out in Gen 1! I'm realizing now that my only exposure to being frozen in Gen 1 was Pokemon Stadium, never Red/Blue/Yellow. Just goes to show how unused the ice type is in those games, Lorelei is the only trainer that even comes to mind with access to Ice Beam.

I just now noticed that the trainer says "feat" instead of "feet." What a compliment? (2:36)

And that's how you reincarnate from being an Inquisition torturer into a youtuber

would giving each of them an oran berry or leftovers restore their hp when it gets low? i do not know much about first gen games but im wondering if this would increase the time even more lol!!

How curious that Nidoran has a 25% chance of hitting you with Poison Sting, and he ended up using it 47 times over the course of 200 turns. 47 is almost 50, which is 25% (or 1/4) of 200. So, during that 200 turn run, he was using Poison Sting really close to 25% of the time. Awesome!

Even better is that if this was on real hardware, it would be incredibly unlikely for the batteries to even last long enough

I lose it when Pikasprey casually throw sentences like "In order to lose faster" or "We absolutely need to lose this battle".

If this were done on a Gameboy, I suspect the batteries might even die before the battle finishes. In that case, it might make it actually impossible if the player couldn't even keep the system on for long enough to finish the battle and save.

Assuming everything else works similarly, this would be a bit easier to set up in JP Red/Green using Blizzard which has a 30% freeze chance, also worth noting is Gengar's max HP with 15 DVs (31 IVs) and full stat exp (EVs) is 323 which is about 25% higher (therefore longer) than the calculations shown here. I also wonder if with max Defense a crit would even do 1 damage with Pikasprey claiming the crit here barely rolls high enough for it, but of course that would defeat the purpose of the series if so.

This is probably the most devious video of yours I've seen yet

Satan was running out of ideas for hell, luckily there are Pikasprey videos

9:56 I laughed at the addition of more frozen gengars lmaooooo

9:50 - “Take the most horrific… awful thing you can think of, and multiply it by cancer.”

Every time you upload these, it's the highlight of the year

That kid would defiantly regret picking a fight. Imagine fighting six maxed out ghosts with a low-level Pokémon, receiving no damage and still wishing you never got into this..

"This is the lockpickinglawyer and today we are exploring the world of Pokémon. Now this softlock might seem impenetrable, but it actually has a major design flaw..."

So many softlocks could have been mitigated if Pokémon had a "revert to last save point" option.

Picture for a moment, a world where Pokemon had Abilities from the very beginning, and specifically that G1 Gengar had its current Ability, Cursed Body. All the glitches of G1 still present, just with the additional agonizing situation of 30% of those Poison Stings getting hit with Disable.

My coworker mentioned you worked with him at a chain grocer in NS, super cool to hear you're from NS, considering I've been watching you for so long. Keep it up and great video as always!

It's been awhile! I'm always happy to see some SoftLockPicking land in my subs box. Really loved this one - nice work! Looking forward to the next one.

Now imagine gen 1 had forced animations and Shinies, and that it was possible to force the text to be slow and name every Gengar AAAAAAAAAA. Now THAT would be brutal.

Holy shit Him saying 'over the years' Has it really been going on years at this point. Good lord. Stay awesome bro

Pikasprey: Up until now we've only been using one Gengar. But what if we were to add more? Me: Jesus

I can imagine Pikasprey sitting in the Thinker position for half a year concocting this softlock.

"this is the soft lock picking lawyer and today i am going to show this serious soft-lock flaw in the entire gen 1."