Jrose 11 is a Canadian YouTuber who is best known for his playthroughs of Pokemon games in difficult or unusual ways. Series of his include:
- Kanto Solo Challenges, where he tries to beat Pokémon Red and Blue with various Pokemon at the lowest possible level and as fast as possible.
- Impossible Challenges, where he takes on incredibly difficult challenges such as beating the game with only a Magikarp or without taking any damage.
- Minimum Battles, where he tries to beat the game while battling the fewest Pokemon possible.
- Catch 'Em All, where as the name suggests, he summarizes the quickest possible path towards completing the Pokedex in Generation I-IV games.
Tropes featured in Jrose 11's work:
- Butt-Monkey: Lt. Surge and Bruno get this treatment due to neither of them having very good teams relative to their placements in the game. While Surge gets the brunt of the jokes at his expense, Bruno is often noted to be so pathetic as to not even warrant more than minimum notation of his battles. Erika also gets this treatment to an extent due to the sheer amount of times Jrose forgets she exists.
- Jrose even played a hacked version that gave all the trainers level 100 Pokemon, and still beat Surge on the first try due to bad Gen I AI.
- Early Game Hell: In Kanto based runs, overcoming Brock is oftentimes the first and one of the most daunting challenges Jrose has to tackle due to both of his Pokemon having sky high Defenses and type priority over Normal type moves, which is all that most Pokemon in the early game are going to have access to.
- Magikarp has been the subject of four different challenges (Red/Blue and their remakes, Gold/Silver, and Violet) and Abra has been the subject of three (Red/Blue, Yellow, and Gold/Silver). Both of these Pokemon start off with only one useless non-damaging move, meaning the only way to do any damage is to lose all of their PP against random wild Pokemon until they can use Struggle, which is a moderately-powerful move that deals recoil. Leveling them up until they can learn another move (which in Abra's case has to be by TM since it doesn't have any others through level-up) takes hours.
- Early-Installment Weirdness:
- One of his earliest solo challenges, beating the Kanto remakes with only a Magikarp, used items. All future runs banned the use of items in battle.
- The solo run of Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire with only a Feebas featured one battle where he used Double Team (a move that increases evasion). Later runs specifically disallowed this strategy, as it's considered a very 'cheap' or luck-based strategy.
- The "Badge Boost Glitch", an unavoidable oversight where the 12.5% stat boosts to various stats after specific Gym badges are recalculated every time the player's stats change, was poorly understood at the beginning of the Kanto solo challenge series and is used to much greater effect later. Most notable is the Squirtle run, in which its defense-boosting move Withdraw (which would have allowed this bug to be used to great effect) was forgotten early.
- Guide Dang It!: Something that really gets on Jrose's nerves during his "Catch 'em All" videos is any Pokemon where the method of catching and/or evolving them is incredibly convoluted or tedious. Some examples discussed include:
- Catching Feebas and evolving it into Milotic in Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, which requires fishing on specific randomly-generated and changing-daily tiles and then playing a difficult-on-singleplayer minigame to cook up enough Poffins to fulfil the evolution condition (which took Jrose two tries since his first Feebas didn't have the innate stats necessary to evolve whatsoever).
- Catching Munchlax in Diamond, Pearl and Platinum, due to the tedious and random nature of the mechanics required to encounter one along with this method specifically being immune to Save Scumming.
- Finding Electrike in the Johto Safari Zone in the fourth-generation remakes, due to the unintuitive and complicated nature of the Safari Zone in that game.
- Hope Spot: Other than his first solo challenge with Magikarp in Red and Blue, he only uploaded successful challenges until June 2022, when his first "failed" attempt was released (and even then, this can be argued given that the failure was to Red, who is either considered the final boss of the game or an optional postgame trainer). Given that all his previous runs had found some way to succeed, it's reasonable to expect that this one would have too.
- Level Grinding: As would be expected from doing solo runs with Pokemon with terrible stats and moves, this comes up a lot. This is compounded by a self-imposed rule that he never saves between Elite Four members outside of the most difficult challenges to avoid reliance on "lucky" strategies.
- His runs with both Magikarp and Abra fit into this category. Since neither of them start with any useful moves whatsoever, the only way to make them level up is through Struggle, a strategy which requires running out of PP first. Beating Brock in the Abra run took hours.
- During his Feebas solo run, Jrose had to EV train (a strategy of knocking out only specific wild Pokemon to train a specific stat) by knocking out 96 Ralts, a species that only shows up 4% of the time on the one route where it can be found.
- Late in his Spinarak solo run, he found himself stuck against Blue. The only item that could get him out of this was the White Herb. Said item is only available in the Battle Frontier at a cost of 32 BP, with a 10-battle win streak needed to earn 1 BP.
- Lethal Joke Character: Despite struggling with a lot of his challenges, there have been a few otherwise laughable mons who have completed the Pokemon League and toppled Champions on their own. Special mention goes to Missingo, who managed to make it through Kanto with relative ease despite having a level-up curve that makes Magikarp Power look tame by comparison and a staggering Defense stat of ZERO.
- Luck-Based Mission: A subversion. Even when using incredibly weak Pokemon, he has self-imposed rules to prevent over-reliance on "lucky" strategies, such as not saving between the Elite Four members (a gauntlet of powerful trainers that have to be defeated all in a row) and not using accuracy- or evasion-altering moves, which are almost universally considered to be very "cheap" ways of getting through battles.
- Played straight in certain runs like the Ditto solo run of Emerald, where a lucky strategy is inherently necessary to win and thus saving between the Elite Four members is allowed.
- He considers Agatha to be a major challenge in the Kanto Elite Four due to being this with very little exception. Rather than having a set strategy, Agatha tends to randomly cycle between moves, Pokemon switches and item usage. Several of her Pokemon know moves such as Confuse Ray and Hypnosis which can and will stop an Elite Four run cold with bad enough luck.
- Running Gag:
- Demoting Lt. Surge, often an incredibly weak Gym Leader, to some lower rank or even to civilian.
- Jrose used to use the Count von Count voice from Sesame Street when using the same move to one-shot several Pokemon. He notes that he stopped doing it so often so that it doesn't get stale but he'll sometimes bust it back out for especially funny sweeps.
- Forgetting to fight Erika until late in the run, oftentimes only realizing it when he tries to use Strength to get a Rare Candy and finds that he can't. After doing it so many times, he started making note of when he's intentionally saving Erika for later and insisting that he hasn't forgot her.
- The Voice:
