Your circus has arrived.
Source
"this hack is a joke and we're the circus act"
— tppmostlynewbie
Twitch Plays Pokémon (TPP) is a series of social experiments in which commands representing buttons on an original Nintendo 3DS (up, down, left, right, A, B, X, Y, L, R, start, and select) and touchscreen coordinates 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 Star is the sixth run of the stream's ninth season, which started on October 15th, 2022 and ended on October 22nd, 2022. It featured Pokémon Star, a hack of Pokémon Ultra Moon, which makes use of model swaps and edited dialogue to tell a brand new story taking place several years after the original Alola games (although the version of the game played on stream had all model swaps in the overworld reverted in order to make it playable on real hardware). Pokémon Star also introduces several new Pokémon species, and makes other ones such as Mythicals and Ultra-Beasts more available during gameplay.
Most notable, however, is that the game is overflowing with memes, to the point where it is sometimes hard to tell if it is meant entirely as a joke hack. Those include but are far from limited to references to The Emoji Movie, NPCs being used as mounts, Pokémon being made to look like Cartoon Network characters, Wailord appearing so large that it doesn't fit on the battle screen, and Lillie being re-characterized as a complete weeb with literal dozens of creepy fans cosplaying as her.
Thus, the Voices, playing as a female character named Gg113ktyhh4w (or "Gigi" for short), faced the sheer insanity unfolding before them, sometimes expressing dismay and disbelief in reaction to it, and other times by fully embracing it. Perhaps accordingly, they eventually came to the conclusion of the run having a circus theme, notably due to several team members picked up along the way actually fitting the motif perfectly, including as "Buzzy" the Blacephalon as a clown, "Jenny" the Primarina as a performing seal, "SimFox" the Delphox as a magician, or "Mooimi" the Mimikyu as a puppet.
See also here
for the archived status of the run.
Twitch Plays Pokémon Star contains examples of:
- A Dog Named "Cat": Played With with a Gastrodon that was added to the team during postgame, named "ELECTRODE". West Sea Gastrodon actually takes the place of Kantonian Electrode within the game's data, and while its model and learnset are those of the former, its typing, base stats and ability are actually those of Electrode.
- Ascended Meme: Gg113ktyhh4w caught a Ducklett that was named "Fucclet", a reference to a popular nickname given to the Ducklett used in Twitch Plays Pokemon Gauntlet X.
- Camera Fiend: Gigi seems to love taking photos, constantly going into the photo studio to take snapshots of her party. Occasionally to the disregard of common sense; at one point, the game crashed when they were trying to take a photo of Wailord, and chat started to joke that Wailord was so big that it had demolished the photo studio when Gigi let it out.
- Circus Episode: The majority of players tended to agree on a "circus" theme for the run, as evidence by recurring hashtags such as #CircusParty, #ClownTeam, or #RingmasterGigi. The idea first arose soon after Electrode evolved into Blacephalon, a Pokémon directly designed after clowns, with players noticing that multiple other party members also fit the theme. The most obvious and universally agreed upon were Primarina as a performing seal, Delphox as a magician, and Mimikyu as a puppet; others were more ambiguous, with multiple roles suggested for Lurantis among which ringmaster, tightrope walker, or magician's assistant, and Wailord being given the rather generic title of "comically huge animal". The Host was suggested to be a ringmaster herself, another clown due to her brightly-colored hairstyles, or even a beast tamer due to wearing clothing reminiscent of a safari outfit when the idea of a "circus team" first came up, with the role of her "beasts" potentially being filled by Zeraora, Wailord, and/or Linoone.
- Dangerous Forbidden Technique: Players avoided using Z-Moves for the majority of the game, as one early attempt at using one, namely Bloom Doom, resulted in the game crashing immediately after the move animation completed. This was actually caused by the RotomDex having a random chance of appearing after using a Z-Move to grant the player a second one; because the hack changed its in-game model to turn it into the "LillieDex", it appearing in battle caused the game to break down. As a result, the chat elected not to risk using Z-Moves unless absolutely necessary.MyRattata: 200 POWER GAME INSTANTLY CRASHES ON FAIL TO KO
- This was eventually subverted late into the run, as players ended up realizing that the LillieDex would not appear to grant them a second Z-Move as long as no Lillie Power was active; thus, all that was needed to be able to safely use Z-Move was to make sure not to any Lillie Powers. Just to be on the safe side, however, chat still used Z-Moves sparsely nonetheless.
- Easter Egg: Albeit hard to see due to the camera's low resolution, the shelf seen through the QR Scanner has a totem sticker taped on it, similar to those players have to collect in-game.
- Failed a Spot Check: During the seventh attempt at defeating Totem Tapu Fini, part of the plan was to try and have Mimikyu use Thunder Wave to paralyze the opponent. Chat proceeded to apply said strategy, completely failing to notice that Misty Terrain, which prevents status conditions, was still in play, despite this hack having it feature very obvious giant sweets all around the field.
- Family Theme Naming: A Linoone named "racc" after the "RaccAttack" Twitch emote and an Arcanine named "tppWowee" after the Growlithe-depicting TPP variation of the "Wowee" emote were left in the Daycare, and produced an offspring that was named "HYPERRACC", after another Twitch emote.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation: In order for the game to properly run on physical hardware, the vast majority of model swaps in the overworld were disabled. This led to the dialogue very often not matching the characters seen on screen, such as Wicke regularly appearing as Kikui, or the entirety of the "Lillie Valley" residents as regular Pikachu.
- Gender Bender: Upon evolving from U-Brionne to Primarina-X, !j (9999reej changed from male to female. This led to one of his popular nicknames among players, "Jerry", being changed to "Jenny".
- Godzilla Threshold: The battle against Tapu Fini turned out to be a particularly difficult fight; not only did it benefit from Legendary stats that were further boosted by its Totem aura, but the two allies it called in battle were a Ribombee that would increase its stats through Quiver Dance as much as possible if left alone to the point of being able to outspeed and one-shot every Pokémon on the team and knew to use Pollen Puff in order to heal Tapu Fini, and a Shiinotic able to put most of the team's Pokémon to sleep using Spore. On top of that, this was one of the few fights in which Primarina-SP's Wonder Guard ability was mostly irrelevent as Tapu Lele had access to two powerful Fairy-type moves that could easily take it down.
So, after multiple failed attempts and despite all strategies the chat could come up with (take advantage of Linoone's Gluttony ability to maximize its attack with Belly Drum and immediately heal with a held Berry, having Mimikyu set up Light Screen and paralyze Tapu Fini with Thunder Wave thanks to the one free turn granted by its Disguise ability, setting up Sunny Day with Delphox to take full advantage of Lurantis' Solar Blade and Leaf Guard), the chat decided to resort to using a Z-Move, despite the fact that they were still thought to be at risk of summoning the LillieDex which would crash the game. With the blessing of the Streamer, Lurantis was equipped with Grassium Z, which players agreed to only use as a last resort; on the following attempt, with Tapu Fini having only one quarter of its health left and Lurantis having only one turn left to live, Bloom Doom was used and succeeded in taking Tapu Fini down, finally earning Gg113ktyhh4w victory over her final Captain Trial. - Kaleidoscope Hair: Gigi went through a number of different hairstyles and colours, usually blonde or pink; she ended the game with a pink bob (and matching outfit), but spent most of her time with blonde pigtails or braids, and is usually depicted in fanart with blonde pigtails with pink and blue tips.
- Late to the Realization: At the start of Day 4, players engaged in a Chain of Deals quest that involved trading multiple Legendary Pokémon. It took until the second to last trade for them to realize that all of said Pokémon were actually holding extra Master Balls that they had neglected to take from them... and then proceeded a few minutes later to repeat the exact same mistake, noticing just a mere few seconds after agreeing to the last trade that they had forgotten to get the extra Master Ball beforehand again.tppmostlynewbie: uhhh waittppmostlynewbie: it's holding atppmostlynewbie: shit
- No-Sell: Among the multiple forms that Primarina could take, Primarina-SP was particularly notable for being a Water/Dragon Pokémon with Wonder Guard as its ability, meaning it could only be damaged by either Fairy-type or Dragon-type moves. While most important Trainers were smart enough to switch to a Pokémon that did have a way of damaging it, some of them straight up had no way whatsoever of inflicting damage to it, with notable examples including Guzma and Raika, both of them fought at the Pokémon League as an Elite 4 Member and a Title Defense opponent respectively.
- Portmanteau: Kantonian Raticate has been replaced with Pheromosa in-game, but for some reason kept both Ratticate's name and moveset. As a result, the one that was caught by the chat was named "Roachicate" ("Roach" + "Raticate").
- Recursive Reality:
- The room seen through the QR Scanner at one point featured a group of Pikachu plushies watching a TV screen, which displayed the stream itself, on which they were watching themselves watching the stream.
- The run concluded with the 3DS camera looking around the room to find various hidden QR codes. At one point, it was directed towards a screen on which the stream itself was broadcasted, creating an infinite recursion◊.
- Ret-Gone: About an hour into the run, the chat hit a button combo that was accidentally left activated and triggered a debug menu, which led to the game needing to be reset and both a Turtwig and a Totodile that had been caught after the previous save to be lost. Possibly subverted in the case of the latter, however, as another Totodile was caught shortly after the game resumed and hailed by chat as the "return" of the one that was erased by the reset.
- Shout-Out: Lurantis was named "MEIRA", as a deliberate reference to the Touhou Project character of the same name.
- Super Special Move: Lurantis has the Z-move called Bloom Doom, a Dangerous Forbidden Technique that has a chance of causing the game to crash if the LillieDex is summoned. She uses it to take down a low-on-hit-points Tapu Fini, who has Legendary stats and is boosted by a Totem aura.
- Taking You with Me: Totem Kartana was defeated by Voltorb's Aftermath ability, which took down its last few remaining health points upon the latter being knocked out.
- Willfully Weak: During the initial scouting of the Elite 4, it turned out that Olivia and Nanu both had only one Pokémon each that could actually damage Primarina-SP, as its Wonder Guard ability combined with its Water/Dragon typing meant it could only get hit by Dragon- or Fairy-type moves, while Guzma was simply completely unable to damage it at all. This made the battles so laughably easy that the Voices deliberately chose to switch out of the Primarina-SP form just to keep the battles actually interesting.
