Web Video / Pikasprey

Pikasprey ^note prounouced "Pik-aspree", not "Pika-spray", also known by his real name of Christian, is a YouTuber who makes videos about various video games, often for the purpose of reviewing, analysing, or playing them.

He has two separate YouTube channels and a Twitch channel:

• Pikasprey Blue: A Let's Play channel for himself and, occasionally, his brothers or his friend Trevor. Some videos involve multiple games with the same theme, such as Super Mario Bros. fan-games. Streams also get uploaded here. Games on "Blue" are often later discussed on...
• Pikasprey Yellow: A game review-and-analysis channel, with multiple series in addition to his other content:
  • "Unused Content", where he explores dummied-out content in games.
  • "Hidden Content", which focuses on hard-to-find secrets.
  • "Odd Fan Games", in which he plays and reviews strange fan-games, good or bad.
  • "Soft-Lock Picking", where he purposefully makes a game invokedUnintentionally Unwinnable, and then proceeds to find ways to escape the trap.
  • "Gem Collecting", where he finds obscure and/or unusual games to give them a review and synopsis.

The games he features fit into a wide range, being anything from Pokémon and Sonic the Hedgehog, to more obscure games like Confess My Love, to fan games, ROM hacks, and parodies; The basic criteria is, if it'll be weird or challenging, he'll play it. This sometimes include setting his own challenges to push the limits of the game, exploiting glitches, or playing whatever his audience requests.

He also made Turtle Head, and supported the creation of its Fan Remake, Unmasked.

Please note though, some of the games played on "Blue" are NSFW; Only the basics about those games will be discussed when necessary.

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Tropes featured in Pikasprey's work:

• Bait-and-Switch: In the "BAD Mario Fan Games" video, Pikasprey introduces it as a video covering the topic his viewers have been "demanding I cover for a while now"... as a screencapped comment asking him to feature unused content in the fourth series of Pokémon games floats into view.
• Batman Grabs a Gun: Generally, in his Pokémon playthroughs, he strictly adheres to a personal rule against using items in battle. In his Smeargle playthrough of Pokémon FireRed, however, while trying to get a Gastly to use Night Shade so he could sketch it, he got hit with Hypnosis, and his patience had been drained so much by that point that he gave in and used an Awakening.
  YouTube comment: Christian, you... you used an item in battle. How did it feel? Liberating?
• Blatant Lies: Played for Laughs when he contradicts what happened or is happening within the playthrough, such as insisting in Uzi's Drugged Adventure that he's killing the monsters with love, and that he absolutely did not take more than one attempt to get the good ending of Sleepless Night.
• The Cameo: Christian has been invited as a guest on several channels, often referencing the challenge runs he's set for himself, or demonstrations involving exploiting game design loopholes.
  • In an April Fool's joke, Pikasprey took over as narrator for False Swipe Gaming's video on Ditto's viability in competitive Pokemon.
  • VG Myths made "Can You Beat Pokémon Without Getting Hit?" where Gamechamp3000 attempted to complete a run of Pokémon Blue without taking any damage from opponents' attacks or status effects. Pikasprey, on invitation, joined in as a guest commentator to point out how ridiculous the challenge's premise was, observe quirks of enemy AI, and chip in as the voice of the rival character. Most of Christian's quips involve some variation of "Oh no. I lost again" in his usual deadpan voice. The final confrontation at the end of the game has Christian put on a Badass Boast that is an odd combination of deadpan and awesome.
    "And this is where it all comes to an end. No human being has the willpower to survive Viridian Forest power-levelling twice in one lifetime. There will be no more VG Myths. When people think of Pokémon challenge runs they will think only of ME. I’m about to end your entire career."
  • Picking a Smeargle as your starter on the open world ROM hack Pokémon Crystal Clear gives you a message from the modder, Shockslayer, which reads "But why would you do this?" and is signed off by Asprey.
• Common Knowledge: Pikasprey addresses this In-Universe; he's completely aware that the nurses in the Pokémon games aren't named "Joy" like in the anime, but he still likes saying "Heal me up, Joy" when going to the Pokémon Center.
• Constructive Criticism: Despite his penchant for sarcasm, the reviews are quite honest and fair. While any flaws will be explained in detail, any good points will be praised, and in general, he admits he never wants to insult people who try their best in making a game, even if it's a bad one.
• Cutting the Knot: Christian very quickly discovered in his Ditto runs that, in lieu of using Ditto's transformation gimmick to turn enemy trainers' Pokémon against them, it was often much more efficient to spend all of Transform's PP and instead just use Struggle to beat over everything. This was especially the case in Gold/Silver due to how weak the trainers' first Pokémon tend to be.
• Deadpan Snarker: Christian's commentary is always extremely dry and sarcastic, with lines such as:
  "Point is, I proved someone wrong on the internet. And at the end of the day, isn't that what really matters?"
• Determinator: In some Pokémon playthroughs, he'll set some utterly brutal challenges for himself, but won't stop trying until he either succeeds or can no longer continue.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Christian reserves his greatest disdain for games where it's clear that the developers put in minimal to no effort, particularly for commercially released products such as the Game Boy ports of Mortal Kombat. Duel Masters: Kaijudo Showdown has him refuse to play the game after realizing the NPC dialogue comprises riddles from a joke book for kids, calling it "one of the most disgusting things I have ever seen in a video game".
    "The level of how much (the developers) had to have not cared is astounding here. If I still did live bits on this show, this would be the part where I pull out my prop gun and shoot the cartridge."
  • Christian also takes a very dim view of plagiarism, mentioning it in his satirical "How to Become a Sonic Fan" video without any sarcasm.
    "No, but seriously stop stealing other people's work and calling it your own."
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Multiple:
  • The title for the "Unused Content" series, which is jokingly referred to as "creatively named", is stating the obvious: a series about unused content in games.
  • "Odd Fan Games" is a series about, well, reviewing odd fanmade games.
• Guide Dang It!: Multiple:
  • Discussed in "Hidden Content: Mortal Kombat's Insane Secret Characters", where he complains about how cryptic and hard it is to unlock the secret Jade and Smoke fights. It's then parodied, where he makes his own Original Character "Donny Rage", who can only be unlocked with an impossible series of steps, including "having an A in your first name".
  • Pointed out in his video for Confess My Love when he tries to unlock the Mutated Room... and learns that following the steps required, which are never outright alluded to during gameplay, only has a 1 in 3 chance of triggering it:
    "Are. You. Kidding Me."
  • In his playthrough of The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons, he gives up figuring out how to hit Onox and just reads a walkthrough. When he finds that the boss only takes damage from spin attacks, his reaction is priceless:
    "Because yeah, the sword wasn't working, so clearly, I'm supposed to use the sword!"
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: Though his characters are usually named "Pikasprey" or "Christian", he sometimes takes advantage of this:
  • He named his silly-looking Duel Masters Kaijudo Showdown character "Cancer the Human".
  • When annoyed with Sleepless Night, he changed the character's name from "Pikasprey" to "I Hate This". In his "friendly" playthrough, he became "Frienderson". In the final run, his character's name was "Bullshit".
• Hoist by His Own Petard: His Ditto-only run of Silver has him going into length about an opposing Trainer whose only Pokémon was also a Ditto, and because Pikasprey's Ditto is faster, it will spend each turn Transforming into the other Ditto and resetting the PP on Transform each time while the opposing Ditto's Transform fails every turn (as a Pokémon can't Transform into a Pokémon that has Transformed). This eventually resulting in the NPC's Ditto running out of PP and beating his Ditto with Struggle like Pikasprey has done for much of the playthrough. Fortunately, as he notes, going in with Struggle makes quick work of this battle, and it's an optional one anyway.
  "So for this battle, I'm pretty much forced to sit there until I'm defeated by my own stupid strategy."
• Hopeless Boss Fight: Red ends up being this for Pikasprey's Ditto-only Crystal run. Because all of his Pokémon are extremely high-leveled, Struggling will lead to Ditto being knocked out before Red's third Pokémon, and if it Transforms into Red's first Pokémon (Pikachu), it still can't get past more than four members of Red's team even if it got perfect RNG on everything. Red always keeps his two Electric-weak members for last, meaning Ditto will certainly run out of Electric moves before getting to them, and Charizard one-shots Ditto with Flamethrower.
• Hypocritical Humor: In Pokémon Crystal, he once encountered a wild Stantler, a relatively mediocre Pokémon, and proceeded to say: "Hey look, it's Stantler! The world's most useless Pokémon!" So what Pokémon did he send out? A Smeargle. And sure enough, his Smeargle gets knocked out.
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • His solution for escaping the Lorelei soft-lock ^note in which the player's Rage-using mon is trapped in an endless battle against her perpetually-healing Dewgong involves so much luck with RNG that nobody would actually be able to do it- the player would have to miss Rage every turn until running out of PP, a near-impossible feat as Rage is officially 100% accurate, meaning that it actually has a 1 in 256 chance of failing in the original game. The odds of doing so twenty times in a row? 1 in 68 quindecillion. if Rage has the maximum 32 PP, the chance is 1 in 115,8 quattorvigintillion.
  • His attempt to beat Pokémon Crystal with just a Ditto eventually became a purely-luck based game, one where everything had to go right for him to win a battle. To even come close to winning against Red, he needed to have impossible luck, such as every electric move hitting, crit-ing, and paralyzing.
  • Revisited with his Graveler soft-lock for Pokémon FireRed ^note where the player is stuck with a Graveler that can only use status moves before blowing itself up, preventing them from winning against a Rocket Grunt in Mt. Moon. The only way to get past the Rocket Grunt in the way is to cause his Pokémon to faint themselves with Struggle usage, which can only happen if Graveler spends enough turns without using up PP and causing itself to use Selfdestruct or Explosion. Pikasprey notes this is technically possible by paralyzing Graveler with the help of wild Paras using Stun Spore, and hoping that Graveler loses enough turns due to paralysis... but the sheer number of turns Graveler has to skip means that this is very unlikely to occur.^note However, as a comment on the video points out, this is actually a subversion in that it's not even a softlock at all - Mt. Moon has hidden mushroom items that can regenerate after taking a certain number of steps, meaning that they cannot be completely gotten rid of. All the player has to do is pick a couple, sell them, and buy some Poké Balls. Christian himself seems to have overlooked this.
  • Another similar FireRed video involves getting stuck on a mandatory Bug Catcher battle in Viridian Forest with nothing but a Level 100 Weezing who can only use Explosion. Because the level is so high and the player has no badges, the Weezing could refuse to obey the player for long enough that the enemy Weedle runs out of PP and is forced to use Struggle. But the odds of this happening 75 times in a row are astronomical, and it would take long enough that the player might as well restart the game and play through to Viridian Forest normally.
  • Most of his Smeargle and Ditto-based runs end up involving this (as mentioned above). For example, when he played Pokémon Crystal with a team of 6 Smeargle, he faced problems with Morty, the Ghost-type Gym Leader. Only half of his Smeargle could even damage Morty's Pokémon (due to only knowing Normal-type moves), and when he got to Morty's ace Gengar it kept killing his team. Christian's solution was to keep retrying the battle until one of his Smeargle managed to burn Gengar with Ember (which only has a 30% chance of happening). He won by stalling until Gengar finally succumbed to burn damage.
  • One of his Softlock Picking episodes involves trapping the player with a 1-HP Chansey in front of the Lottery in the Lilycove Department Store. Taking a step away causes it to faint from poison and send the player to Pacifidlog Town, permanently trapping them. The only chance to escape is to win a Master Ball from the lottery and use it on a random wild Pokémon to teach Surf. The chance of getting a Master Ball is 1 in 65,536, and the lottery can only be played once per real-life day.
  • Another Softlock Picking involves trapping the player in the Fortree City Gym without the Devon Scope and with a party full of traded Level 100 Gyarados that only know attacking moves, meaning the player is blocked off by the invisible Kecleon and has no way of getting rid of it. The only way to escape is by losing against Winona, which can only be done by switching the Gyarados in and out until all of them get slowly and laboriously knocked out. The trap is intended to have a particularly sadistic final turn as when the player is inevitably reduced to a single Gyarados, they will have to attack and pray that the Gyarados either loses a turn to paralysis inflicted by Dragon Breath from Winona's Altaria, or disobeys so the Altaria can knock it out... except not really because Altaria is faster and knocks out Gyarados with no luck required (due to Altaria having +6 Speed from Dragon Dance and Gyarados being paralyzed), which can easily be seen in the video but is never acknowledged by Christian.
• Mood Whiplash: One of the Sonic.exe fan-games played started off with a relatively creepy and interesting atmosphere, being a first-person adventure game...until a 3-D rendering of Sonic.Exe appeared in a flash, leaving Christian stunned and laughing.
• One-Steve Limit: Hilariously inverted in his randomized, one controller simultaneous playthrough of Pokémon Emerald and Pokémon Sapphire, where about half of the NPCs wind up being named Florentino. Eventually, Pikasprey gets called on the PokéNav while trying to hatch an egg next to the Weather Institute:
  PokéNav: Hi! Asprey, hello! This is Florentino!
  Pikasprey: Which one?!
• Palette Swap: Parodied with "Donny Rage", an Original Character who is nothing more than an all-red Johnny Cage sprite.
• Record Needle Scratch: Plays during the review of Meteor the Hedgehog when he gets into the first battle and sees the amateurishly drawn OC he's fighting.
  "And in that moment, I thought of all the other things I could be doing today."
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: When talking about the random chance of getting a Guide Dang It! location in Confess My Love:
  "Are. You. Kidding Me."
• A Rare Sentence: During his Slakoth-only run of FireRed/LeafGreen, he mentions being chipped down by Pidgey and Rattata due to Slakoth being too slow to escape from them and Truant giving wild Pokémon free turns to attack, followed by this:
  "Now at this point, to prevent the same thing from happening going forward, I stop to grind for a while before I enter Viridian Forest. Now there's a sentence I never thought I'd have to say in my life."
• Sadistic Choice:
  • One of his Softlock Picking videos involves trapping the player in Cerulean City with no items, no money and only one Pokémon whose moveset won't be able to beat the rival, blocking off Route 24. The sadistic part is that the Pokémon in question is a Shiny Poliwhirl, which the player could trade to an NPC in Cerulean but likely won't want to, even when they have no other option besides restarting the game and losing the Shiny anyway.
  • A later video has a similar setup, with the player trapped in Pacifidlog Town with nothing but a shiny Bagon, who will eventually evolve into a Salamence with enough Level Grinding, but it would be quicker to start the game over. Again, in Emerald, the player has the option to trade it to an NPC for a Horsea, but they'd be losing the Shiny either way.
• Sarcasm Failure: The opening cutscene of Mario and Sonic: Revenge of the Deadly Six leaves him speechless, and he admits he'd run out of jokes to tell.
• Sdrawkcab Name: In his Smeargle playthrough of Pokémon Crystal, he names one of his Smeargle "Elgreams", only to later realize he messed up this trope, as it should have been "Elgraems".
• Self-Deprecation: A common joke on the channel is about how the videos aren't that great and that the audience is just there to watch Christian suffer.
  "If you're here, chances are you have an interest in Pokémon, or unused content in games. Or you just typed "mediocrity" into the search bar, but either way, you've come to the right place."
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Invoked.
  • Christian's playthroughs of Pokémon games commonly involve a strict challenge for the sake of seeing if it can be done, with a basic rule being that he can't use healing items in battle. These challenges include:
    • A fully-randomized Pokémon Platinum Nuzlocke run.
    • Playing a game with only a team of six Smeargle, a single Ditto, or a single Slakoth to use in battle.
    • Setting up traps that would render the game unwinnable, and then attempting to find a way to beat them, such as using only a level 5 Magikarp at the Indigo Plateau.
  • In Bears Love Honey, he became determined to win the game while collecting every single collectable, getting every ending, and in one round, not losing a single jar of honey.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: In his Smeargle playthrough of Pokémon Crystal, he spends an entire minute deciding whether to sketch Swift from an Espeon. Once he's made up his mind, said Pokémon proceeds to render the point moot by using Quick Attack, causing his Smeargle to sketch that move instead.
  (Espeon uses Quick Attack) Noooo, noooo, kill me, kill me! (Smeargle survives and uses Sketch) FUUU-HUHU-HUHU-HUHUUUUUUUCK!!!
• Signing-Off Catchphrase: In his Yellow channel:
  • He always ends his videos saying "My name is Pikasprey, and thanks for watching".
  • Also inverted, as he always starts his videos with "Hello, internet users."
• Sudden Soundtrack Stop: The background music in his reviews will go silent to emphasize his reaction to whatever is happening, most often a quick and blunt line-of-dialogue that clashes with the original tone of the scene.
• Take That!:
  • The "How to Become a Sonic Fan" video is a mockery of the Sonic the Hedgehog fandom.
    (after Pikasprey discusses how to make "original characters" by using the Fill tool in Microsoft Paint to change the colors on official artwork) "Shadow the Hedgehog? More like, Phil the Hedgehog! Ha ha ha ha ha - Copyright 2015, DO NOT STEAL."
  • He makes a lot of shots aimed at Sonic.exe and its fans, referring to it as an abomination or similar.
  • "It's like...that K-On! character maker that all the kids on DeviantArt like to use. Or pretty anybody who doesn't know how to draw likes to use. ...So, yeah, DeviantArt."
• This Is Gonna Suck: His video on Donkey Kong Country starts with him claiming that the Donkey Kong franchise is perfect and untouchable...until he remembers what the title of his video is, and watches the intro with a Flat "What" and an "Oh, no.".
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: Invoked; in "Soft-Lock Picking", Christian goes out of his way to create traps that'll completely ruin his game. The trope is usually subverted, however, as the point is to try and escape these unwinnable situations without cheating, proving the game can be salvaged with enough patience and effort. The series has since transitioned into him setting up scenarios where escape is perfectly possible through obvious methods, but are so tedious to actually pull off (such as harvesting one Berry a day from a single tree for 240 days) that starting a new game would be infinitely more preferable.

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