"...it's Voice goo."
Source
"In Latin, id means simply "it". Sigmund Freud (and his translator) brought the word into the modern vocabulary as the name of what Freud believed to be one of the three basic elements of the human personality, the other two being the ego and the superego. According to Freud, the id is the first of these to develop, and is the home of the body's basic instincts, particularly those involving sex and aggression. Since the id lacks logic, reason, or even organization, it can contain conflicting impulses. Primitive in nature, it wants to be satisfied immediately."
— Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Twitch Plays Pokémon (TPP) is a series of social experiments in which commands representing buttons on an original Game Boy Color (up, down, left, right, A, B, start, and select) are entered into a chat on Twitch, and then translated into a game of Pokémon via an IRC bot. In short, hundreds of people are fighting over a controller. Throughout its life, Twitch Plays Pokémon has spawned hilarious characters, memorable moments, and even a few religions.
Twitch Plays Pokémon Randomized Chatty Crystal is the first run of Season 9 and eighth anniversary run of the stream, beginning on February 14th, 2022 and ending on February 28th, 2022. It features the return of Pokémon Chatty Crystal, the Pokémon Crystal hack from the previous anniversary, complete with all of the dialogue being once more made up of Markov chains
built from chat messages, and gives it the randomizer treatment of mixing up wild encounters, movesets, and evolutions, and Trainer teams; notably, all of the previously featured returning player characters have had their original teams shuffled around, for best and worst.
On top of this, Randomized Chatty Crystal threw in a few twists that helped distinguish it from the original Chatty Crystal, such as reprising the winter theme from Twitch Plays Pokémon Fused Crystal, or throwing a few new battles against previous Hosts into the mix. Most notably, the starter Unown was instead replaced by a Shiny Ditto, which players nicknamed "iD", albeit one that still had only the chat-powered Hidden Power as its sole move, whereas KENYA the Chatot became KENYA the Burmy... which immediately evolved into Chatot.
The Voices picked a female character named JUANA as their Host for this run, and built a team that specifically seemed to focus on self-boosting and healing moves: a Salamence and Chatot with Swords Dance, a Milotic with Milk Drink, an Excadrill with Hone Claws and Softboiled, and a Moltres with Quiver Dance, Sunny Day, and Synthesis. As a result, the primary strategy for a lot of battles consisted of setting up a specific Pokémon for several turns by alternating between self-healing and powering up, then making use of those boosts to sweep through the entire opposing team. Of course, that strategy did not stop some late-game battles from posing a sudden and unexpected challenge.
See also here for the archived status of the run.
Note: Tropes relating to the original Chatty Crystal hack are to be listed on the latter's run page instead of here.
Twitch Plays Pokémon Randomized Chatty Crystal contains examples of:
- Achilles' Heel: Water-type Pokémon were usually the most difficult for JUANA's team to deal with. Excadrill and Moltres were both weak against Water, while Salamence had a double weakness against Ice-type moves, which Water-types often had access to. The only viable counters JUANA had at her disposal were less than ideal too: Moltres could use Sunny Day to weaken Water-type moves but was itself weak to Water and had no real way of fighting back with its only damaging move being Fire-type, Milotic resisted both Water and Ice but only had the unreliable Grass Knot as its sole move not resisted by Water in return, and while Chatot had access to a variety of Grass-type and Electric-type moves thanks to Chatter, it was still weak to their coverage Ice-type moves.
- The rematch against Etr was a particularly notable roadblock as a result of this, as she opened the battle with AIIIAAB's Cloyster, a Water/Ice-type that led little room for set up, and followed with Stars' Swampert, a powerful Water/Ground-type with access to very strong Ice-type and Fighting-type moves, and Cyan's Azumarill, an extremely bulky Water/Fairy-type equipped with Leftovers that took absurdly long to take down. The rematch against Cyan was also a lesser examples of this, as she opened with Stars' Vaporeon, a reasonably bulky Pokémon that also left little room for setting up and even had access to Freeze-Dry, making it a threat even to Milotic.
- Ascended Meme: One memorable meme from the original Chatty Crystal run was "Shoelaxes", a term used to refer to the Snorlax that devs would place to block off the areas that still needed more development time and, when interacted with, prompted a piece of dialogue stating that they were busy tieing their shoelaces. This has been incorporated in this game as an alternate form for Snorlax, with each one having a 1 out of 6 chance of wearing shoes.
- Balance Buff: Ditto has stats that are actually worse than Unown, whose own stats are already fairly mediocre, and as such many played were less than thrilled to be stuck with it. To remedy this, it received two different buffs during the run.
- The first buff happened on Day 2, and saw Ditto's stats boosted from 48 in each stat to 60, giving it a slightly higher total than Unown.
- Due to the lukewarm reception of the first buff, a second buff took place the next day, shortly after the fifth Gym Badge was earned. Ditto's stats were reverted to 48 each, but this was compensated by giving it the move Transform, allowing it to copy its opponents stats at the start of the battle (although Hidden Power remained its only move after transforming). This was received much better, as it made Ditto both more useful and more distinct from Unown.
- Boss in Mook Clothing: One Trainer in the Goldenrod Gym used a Phancero, which has stats comparable to Legendary Pokémon, and proceeded to take down the entire party by itself. She proved notably more difficult to defeat than the actual Gym Leader, who found herself stuck with a Budew, a Kakuna, and a Tentacruel, with only the latter being even remotely useful.
- Dance Battler: JUANA's Moltres was notable for knowing and making use of both Quiver Dance and Teeter Dance. Downplayed after the latter was eventually replaced by Synthesis, although setting up Quiver Dance remained a key part of many battles Moltres took part in.
- Easily Impressed: At the end of one of the Bug-Catching Contests, the results announcer loudly exclaimed "HOLY SHIT A KAKUNA". From that point onwards, the Voices proceeded to exclaim the same thing whenever a Kakuna appeared in the game.
- Fun with Acronyms: The name of this run is sometimes abbreviated as "RaCC", alluding to the RaccAttack emote.
- Glitch Entity: The Kimono Girls during the initial visit to the Ecruteak Dance Theater definitely qualify, to the point where players deemed the place to be "cursed".
- Two of the Kimono Girls were named "UTE 35" in-game with a team of six fainted Pokémon, while the DexNav in the overlay displayed them as "Leader éBneert" with a team of ten Pokémon. The battle against them opened with a single question mark followed by a line of glitched text, which reappeared right before JUANA's sent out her own Pokémon, her palette turning red as she did. They also both sent out a Monferno named "Absol" with a burned status and a health bar that went past the limit of the screen. Last but not least, as soon as the "FIGHT" option was selected, the battle immediately ended.
- Another Kimono Girl, who had crashed the game when first challenged, seemed to be properly functional when interacted with a second time, even getting a proper Trainer name and displaying a team of three Pokémon, although her presence briefly broke the overlay, and her name in the DexNav showed up as an overly long string of nonsensical charactersnote . What truly qualified as a Glitch Entity, however, was what she sent out: a Lv.2 "Pokémon" named "?????", with a slightly too long HP bar, and a grayscale Kimono Girl as its sprite that made it seem straight out of a creepypasta. It proceeded to knock-out a Pokémon 29 levels above it with a single Gust attack (apparently due to having an attack stat of 65535), before the game crashed once more.
- Good Bad Bugs: This hack fixes the glitch that makes it so any transformed Pokémon turns into Ditto upon capture, but not the one that causes wild Pokémon to permanently become Shiny if they transform into a Shiny Pokémon while already transformed. Given that the starter for the run was a Shiny Ditto (who initially didn't know Transform but received it after a Balance Buff), and that several wild Pokémon knew Transform naturally thanks to the randomization, this allowed players to exploit the latter glitch to obtain both a Shiny Ninetales and a Shiny Dragonite.
- History Repeats:
- The original Chatty Crystal run was delayed by two days as the game wasn't ready in time. This run was also delayed by a day as the randomizer for the game wasn't ready in time.
- In Twitch Plays Pokémon Randomized Black, the chat spent a sizable amount of time looking for the Thick Club item, checking every single item laying on the ground and browsing through very single shop, without ever managing to find it, and eventually learned that it was actually excluded from the item randomization due to the randomization settings used. In this run, the chat spent a sizable amount of time looking for the last few Pokémon they needed to complete the Pokédexnote , checking every location at every time of the day and evolving any Pokémon that shared a type with them, without ever managing to obtain them, and eventually learned that they were actually excluded from the Pokémon randomization due to a fault in the randomizer programming.
- Interface Screw: The very last condition to finish the run was to obtain the Virtual Boy, a decoration for the player's room. Upon using it, the entire game's palette changed to red and black, imitating the look of Virtual Boy games.
- Leitmotif: Any time X, the Blissey from Burning Red, made an appearance in one of the Hosts' team, it was accompanied by the song "X Gon' Give It To Ya". Especially appropriate as it turned out to be a major roadblock each time.
- Mythology Gag: The overall winter theme featured in Twitch Plays Pokémon Fused Crystal made its return here, with most locations covered in snow, many bodies of water freezing over, and certain Trainers wearing warm winter outfits.
- Previous Player-Character Cameo: All of the characters that appeared in the original Chatty Crystal are still present and occupying the same roles, but the Pokémon on their teams have now been randomly shuffled around. However, some new faces still showed up:
- Whereas the original Chatty Crystal had ×ᴹɴ(? take the place of Sage Koji inside the Tin Tower, here he instead appeared only after Entei was battled, while the three Sages were instead replaced by the three Hosts from Twitch Plays Pokémon Red-Green-Blue Race. AAAAAAA from Red took the place of Sage Gaku* , AAAA from Blue of Sage Masa* , and B from Green of Saje Koji* .
- Checking the Copycat's bed transported JUANA to the an isolated section of the Seafloor Cavern, in which SS from Metronome Ruby* challenged her to a Metronome-only battle.
- During the Elite 4 rematch, KKKB from the original Chatty Crystal took the place of Paul. Unlike other past Hosts added to the game, she was included in the team randomization, and thus like the returning Hosts used a completely different team* than her original one.
- The Battle Tower featured all seven Hosts along with a selection of twenty-one Pokémon from XD, Theta Emerald EX, Flora Sky, Renegade Platinum, Blazing Emerald, Brilliant Diamond, and Wooper 2: Electric Boogaloo; each Battle Tower challenge would consist of seven battles in a row, each one composed of one Host and three Pokémon selected at random among those.
- The first set of battles was made up of ACCPPQ* , ACCPPQ* , AGGGNNV* , ACCPPQ* , Kr* , ACCPPQ* , and ..hnv* .
- The second set of battles was made up of ACCPPQ* , ACCPPQ* , Kr* , and a;;;/]]]][%* .
- The third set of battles was made up of WOOPER* , ..hnv* , Kr* , ..hnv* , ACCPPQ* , ACCPPQ* , and WOOPER* .
- The fourth set of battles was made up of AGGGNNV* , ..hnv* , AGGGNNV* , WOOPER* , ACCPPQ* , ABBBCC* , and WOOPER* .
- The Unfought:
- On two occasions, JUANA was defeated by ×ᴹɴ(? before she could face their entire team, and didn't get a second chance to due to winning these battles being optional. The first time was in Cianwood City, where VVVVVV (Torterra, Chatty Crystal), MLLLULVVSS (Nidoqueen, Dual Red) and JHH (Aerodactyl, Crystal Anniversary) were unseen, while the second time was in the Tin Tower, in which aaaaaaakw (Meowth, Gauntlet Black 2 and Piiiv (Vibrava, TriHard Emerald) where not fought. Out of these, only JHH appeared in other teams, while Piiiv only appeared as a Flygon; the others were never battled or even seen for the entirety of the run.
- Out of the 21 Pokémon that could be encountered in the Battle Tower, one of them never appeared in any of JUANA's attempts: BHIICCBBBB, the Chandelure from Theta Emerald EX.
- Utility Party Member: IIIHHH the Floatzel was pretty much treated as such once Milotic took its spot on the team; from that point onwards, it spent most of its time deposited into the Daycare, only being retrieved whenever an area required Surf, Strength and/or Whirlpool to be explored.
- White Mage: Milotic's Milk Drink and Excadrill's Softboiled could both be used outside of battle to transfer 20% of the user's HP to another Pokémon on the team, which was occasionally used by the chat to circumvent their traditional self-imposed "no healing items" rule.
"Thanks, I had fun. Maybe we'll meet again someday."
