She is the One.
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"If Madios have a million fans, then I am one of them. If Madios have ten fans, then I am one of them. If Madios have only one fan then that is me. If Madios have no fans, then that means I am no longer on earth. If the world is against Madios, then I am against the world."
— Copypasta from the Twitch Plays Pokémon chat
Twitch Plays Pokémon (TPP) is a series of social experiments in which commands representing buttons on an original Game Boy Advance (up, down, left, right, A, B, L, R, 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 Snakewood DX is the ninth run of the stream's tenth season, which began on October 14th, 2023, and ended on October 23rd, 2023. Serving as the first part of that year's Witch Plays Pokémon event, it appropriately featured an updated version of Pokémon Snakewood, a horror-themed hack of Pokémon Ruby featuring an original Darker and Edgier storyline set in a Post Apocalyptic version of Hoenn populated by various zombified Pokémon.
Said updated version, titled Snakewood DX, was developed specifically for TPP, and was built on top of the existing updated version Snakewood Zeta, while reverting some of the latter's more questionable changes. On top of toning down the amount of graphic gore to make it more suitable for the stream, Snakewood DX also gave brand new sprites to several of the species introduced in Zeta, tweaked the balance of the game to make it more fair for players, and attempted to fix numerous softlock situations... with varying degrees of success.
See also here
for the archived status of the run. The Snakewood DX revision has been released in the form of a UPS patch, both with and without the censored blood, and can be found here.
Twitch Plays Pokémon Snakewood DX contains examples of:
- Arc Symbol: Eggs were a recurring motif during this run:
- Snakewood itself features multiple notable Eggs within its story. The protagonist at some point receives a Dragon Egg, which actually happens to be the daughter of Meteor, the Dragon King, and multiple original species look exactly like Pokémon Eggs, one of which being the unobtainable Kijilianth while another is another Egg given to the protagonist early on, which hatches into another Egg ("Mysteryegg"), then evolves into another Egg ("Secretegg"), then into yet another Egg ("Hyperegg"), then finally into a Lgendary (in the case of this run, Celebi).
- The latter Egg was named "Alt", and as such formed a duo of sort with "F4" the Azombarill, who itself is not only was based on a Pokémon resembling an Easter Egg but also has a Pokédex entry clamining that it "[thinks it is] a chicken". Furthermore, "Alt" was not only a mainstay member of the team, but was also at some point infected with the extremely rare "strain zero" of Pokérusnote .
- Yet another relevant Egg was the Faceleech Egg, which required a whopping 30,976 steps to hatch. As a result, it spent close to 18 hours on the team before hatching (aka the quasi-entirety of Day 8), the last of which was solely devoted to making the player character run back and forth.
- Because Vigoroth received a new evolution based on its personality value, the entire team was deposited on Day 9 to make room for a total of four Slakoth Eggs, in an attempt to get one with the correct value. As the first Slakoth hatched fit the criteria, two of said Eggs were then deposited into the PC without ever hatching.
- Black Blood: Snakewood DX censored the gore imagery from the original Snakewood, with the blood either removed entirely or changed from red to pink.
- The Bus Came Back: The starter Koffing was deposited early on the second day due to Magnemite being required on the party to progress, and was ultimately left there in favour of new party members. It was however withdrawn during the last few hours of the run, brought into the Pokémon League, and even had a moment to shine by stalling against Kingmadio during the final battle, thus entering the fourteenth and final Hall of Fame of the run.
- Content Warning: Although Snakewood DX was bowdlerized compared to the original Snakewood to tone done the gore, it was nonetheless the first main run to feature a Twitch content warning for "Violent and Graphic Depictions", due to some of the game's unaltered dialogue.
- Game-Breaking Bug: While exploring the Island of Calm during the second day of the run, an unavoidable battle against "The Shaderu" turned out to cause the game to completely freeze twice in a row, halting progress until the Streamer swapped out the ROM for a different one.
- Halloween Episode: Snakewood DX was specifically run in October due to being horror-themed, thus fitting the month's festivities. The overlay even used the "Witch Plays Pokémon" title that's usually reserved for Halloween intermissions rather than the regular "Twitch Plays Pokémon" one.
- Hurricane of Puns: During a long, grueling hunt for rare "madio" Pokémon (specifically Burstmadio and Kingmadio, which had a 1% chance of being encountered each), bored and exhausted players started posting numerous game, movie or anime titles changed to include the word "Madio" in them, such as "Super Madio 64", "Madio Hunter: Rise", "Madio's Ultimate Alliance", "Spider-Madio", "Madiocraft", "Madio Ball Z", "Mahou Shoujo Madio Magica", "One-Punch Madio", "Sekiro: Madios Die Twice", "Jet Set Madio", "Madio Madio Tsu", "Shin Madio Tensei", "Madiogascar", "Madiopoly", "Madiopardy", "Madiolorian", "MadioWare", "Fullmadio Alcheimist", "Re:Madio", "Princess Madioke, "Crypt of the MadioDancer", "Madio & Me", "Madiopolis", ...and that was just a few of them.MemeMeow6: oh no the madio brainrot is taking over
- Madness Mantra: On Day 8, user MathyFurret used a stack of Bloody Mail items to display the message "ALL RUNS AND NO PBR MAKES MATHY A DULL BOY" on screen. Enough of them for the message to repeat over and over for over 15 whole minutes.
- Mythology Gag:
- Azombarill was renamed to "F4", following the tradition of Azumarill being referred to as some combination of a letter with the number 4, as with "M4" (M ---/’/’4 from Emerald), "T4" (!t44444’’’tu from Omega Ruby), and "Y4" (YYYYXOOOOO from Prism).
- Shaderu was renamed "The Shady", referencing one of several names of a major villain from Pokémon Mega Power that had gone memetic during that run.
- Shout-Out:
- The blood being changed from red to pink was not only a practical choice (being clearly different from red while not risking blending into other colors of the 16-bit sprites), but also doubled as a reference to the Danganronpa series.
- The name "F4" was chosen for Azombarill as a reference to the "Press F to pay respects" meme, a phrase originating from a Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare scene in which the player is given said prompt during a funeral scene, due to its status as an undead Pokémon.
- This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: Blastmadio, like most other "madio" Pokémon, was pretty much useless in battle due to only being Lv.1 and having an extremely limited moveset consisting only of two damaging moves, one of them causing it to faint. However, when facing against Fury Z, one of the game's Legendary Pokémon, its dual Fire/Ghost typing made it completely impervious to all of the latter's moves (Will-O-Wisp cannot burn Fire-types, and Sleep Talk and Seismic Toss are both ineffective against Ghost-types), allowing it to stall without issue while players threw Ultra Ball after Ultra Ball.
- Unintentionally Unwinnable: While Snakewood DX was intended to fix the existing softlocks that existed in the original Snakewood, this proved a harder task than expected; as such, players ran into a lot of inextricable situations that required the stream developers to intervene:
- Near the end of the first day, the protagonist jumped inside a pool of water in Slateport City, but rather than end up inside the sunken S.S. Cangrejo as expected, instead found herself stuck inside a well in Necropolis, unable to move and with no way of escaping.
- On the second day of the run, the protagonist went through the door of Jim Fats' store in Shakya Monastery... and never actually made it to the inside of the building, instead treating players to fifteen minutes of black screen before the game was mercifully reset.
- During the fifth day, Famine and Alicia turned out to somehow still be present in Famine's Desert despite the fact that they should have been gone by then. When going to talk to Famine, the game offered no dialogue, but instead the option to use Rock Smash... which immediately broke the game by causing inputs to stop responding.
- On Day 7, While exploring the Solar Caverns (a location based on the Granite Cave of Ruby and Sapphire), the Voices found themselves in a situation where they couldn't progress due to requiring a precise turn with the Mach Bike over cracked ground tiles, which just wasn't feasible with the stream's controls. While walking around waiting for a developer to chime in, they accidentally walked over a cracked ground tile that wasn't actually there in the original Granite Cave, and had a glitched warp that caused the main character to remain stuck in place for the following 8 minutes, only able to look around but not to actually move.
- During Day 8, the character somehow walked through a bridge in Meteor Falls and ended up on top of the water below. As they ran around in amusement, the Voices accidentally caused her to fall down a nearby waterfall, with no way of climbing back up and the game not letting her get back on land, thus getting her stuck inside the body of water with a team much too strong to white out to wild Pokémon under any reasonable amount of time.
- Right after catching Furi Z on Day 8, a broken script prevented it from disappearing from the overworld, and thus caused the main character to remain stuck in place for over 30 minutes before the issue was finally fixed.
- Near the end of the first day, the protagonist jumped inside a pool of water in Slateport City, but rather than end up inside the sunken S.S. Cangrejo as expected, instead found herself stuck inside a well in Necropolis
- You Are Number 6: The main character of this run was simply named "1".
