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DPPt/HGSS The Difficulty of Colosseum

baratron

Moderator of Elder Scrolls
Staff member
Moderator
Is it just me being crap (because I don't ever battle against real people), or is Colosseum's Battle Mode really insanely hard? There are 5 factors which bother me:

1. Hold items. You're only allowed one of each type of item. Only 1 x Leftovers, 1 x Focus Band... and you have to choose which pkmn has it at the very start, when you register your team. You can't swap items in between the different trainer battles :?.

2. No healing. The only healing you can do is automatic from a held berry, or from a move your pokemon has. Ugh.

3. 1 hit KO moves. These seem to be a special feature of the harder Colosseum trainers' move sets, and I've virtually never seen them used before - I actually had to look up Guillotine because I didn't know what it did. I feel that they're not fair, because they negate all strategy - your pkmn could have the highest Def & Sp Def stats possible at Level 50, and still get knocked out immediately. Great.

4. Very little predictability, owing to the fact that you choose 3 or 4 from your team of 6 rather than sending out the whole lot. Most of the trainers have some patterns, like for example the last trainer in the Under Colosseum Double Mode has a Plusle and Minun, a Volbeat and Illumise, and a Solrock and Lunatone. She'll always send out one matched pair then the second (which made her remarkably easy to beat considering the previous rounds - Ground against Plusle & Minun, Fire against Volbeat & Illumise, and Water against Solrock & Lunatone - not much strategy needed). But it's not like the Elite 4, who have known movesets and only 2 or 3 possible starters.

5. Trainers with "impossible" Pokemon. A lot of the trainers' movesets involve one or more egg moves. There's a trainer who has 6 Pokemon all with Wish, only one of whom learns it by level-up. How long would it take a non-cheating "real person" trainer to breed 5 Pokemon all with a particular egg move? You couldn't use the trick of guaranteeing the move by the mother and father both knowing it, because we're talking about moves that can only be learned as egg moves in the first place... ARGH!

All of these factors add up to why I'm finding it so utterly impossible. The 1 Hit KOs are particularly painful. There was one trainer (the 2nd one, Rider Orden) in the Under Colosseum Double Battle who has 6 Pokemon all with at least one 1 Hit KO move, and a Smeargle which has at least 2! I got round it just by using my level 50 Magneton @Leftovers and simply being faster than any of his pkmn. But that's not working against this Walrein.

Anyone know a GOOD & COMPLETE Strategy Guide for Battle Mode? I'll even pay ;) (or my long-suffering partner will pay for the privilege of not living with a stressed-out psycho blethering about Pokemon moves he's never heard of :shock:).
 

Linkachu

Hero of Pizza
Staff member
Administrator
Battle Mode was made specifically to test out different team strategies, thus you end up facing every single one the creators could think of. Makes things tough, eh? ^^;

Most of the things you mentioned (ie. no healing, only one hold item of a kind, battling 3 Pokemon out of a team of 6, perfect movesets) was carried through to Colosseum from the original Pokemon Stadium games on N64. The one hold item/no healing rule is usually present in offical Pokemon tournaments, too, not to mention that you can't cure in normal link-up battles. If you could you'd never be able to know if your win was from healing or your own skill :)

The best way to win at Battle Mode is to have a team with lots of diversity, may it be movesets or the Pokemon themselves. Try to cover your Pokemon's weaknesses (ie. Giving Venusaur EQ to beat off Fire-types, or Zangoose Brick Break to get through Rock-types) and make sure that out of your team of 6 you're able to get Super Effective hits on every type of Pokemon. Even if all the attacks don't get STAB, covering all grounds is your best bet at winning.
2 on 2 battling is a totally different story, though... The strategy needed to win them is above and beyond 1 on 1 matches IMO.

I think what you need is either a good walkthrough from Gamefaqs.com or to buy the official Pokemon Colosseum strategy guide by Nintendo. Either should give you a list of all your opponents Pokemon and their movesets as well as give tips on how to beat 'em (I think).

That's all I can think to say for now. Hope it helped a bit ^^;
 
Simple way to nullify 1-hit ko's use paralyzing moves simple as that . If I rememebr correctly a 1-hitko only works if you go first so paralyzing works wonders.
 

Linkachu

Hero of Pizza
Staff member
Administrator
Some Pokemon also have the ability to nully them (ie. Aggron) but training them might throw off your whole team plan. Considering that Aggron can learn Rockslide from FR/LG, though, it's not such a bad creature anymore.
 

baratron

Moderator of Elder Scrolls
Staff member
Moderator
"Raichu said:
Most of the things you mentioned (ie. no healing"]

I don't disagree with you - BUT it seems awfully tough to have a completely different rule set right from the word go. I mean, do any of the Elite Four members battle without 101 Full Restores plus a bunch of Hyper Potions? In the GBA games, you get used to being able to heal whenever you want to and learn strategies for battling that way.

I wouldn't have minded so much if in the Easy Colosseum (sorry, can't remember the names now) you were allowed to heal whenever you wanted, in the Medium Colosseum you could heal ONCE per match, and then in the Hard Colosseum you weren't allowed to heal at all except with one held berry or with a Pokemon's learned move. That would ease you into the new system gradually.

Eh, the perils of having no one to play link battles with :(. I guess if I did, this wouldn't seem so hard. My RPG playing friends don't dare get into Pokemon because they can't afford another obsession (Final Fantasy takes up too much of their time & money already), and my bf just isn't really into games as much as me.

2 on 2 battling is a totally different story, though... The strategy needed to win them is above and beyond 1 on 1 matches IMO.

It's funny, because I LOVE 2 on 2 battling in the GBA games. The only times I haven't won a 2 on 2 battle on the first try was when I first played Sapphire and didn't really know what I was doing. Didn't even do too badly at the Colosseum Story Mode 2 on 2 battles. Yet I apparently suck at the Battle Mode 2 on 2.

I swear the problem is that you have to choose 3/4 Pokemon to send out at the start of the battle, rather than being able to choose from any of your normal 6. I find myself sitting there looking at the opponent's 6 Pokemon and trying to predict what moveset each of them might have, then trying to work out the STAB and super-effective attacks in both directions, before finally giving up with a headache and just picking my "toughest" 4 Pokemon...

I think what you need is either a good walkthrough from Gamefaqs.com

There's no such thing! At least, not for Colosseum. I've looked. Most of the Colosseum FAQs are barely in coherent English, with even Pokemon names spelled incorrectly, e.g.:

Your umbreon will do well against banette so use faint attack on it.
Use hitmontop or makuhita against dalcatty. Beware banettes
shadow ball as espeon. Use enties fireblast against steelix.
Use the same on vileploom. use faint attack/bite on suicune.
Or use secret power to take a small amount of HP away from it
and possibly paralize it... which is very good to do.
Sunny day is also very useful.


The author of that FAQ has an English name, and his excuse for the incoherence and bad spelling was that "that notepad has no spell check and if I copy it to word it loses its format" :roll:. Yeah, so you save it as MS text with line breaks, copy it to Word, make sure Word is using Courier New or Andale Mono monospaced font, type in a line of 012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345
then just make sure all your lines are the same length. Easy. It's how I wrote my FAQs.

Bah.

I'll look for the game guide book when I'm in Merkia.
 
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