Web Video / Twitch Plays Pokémon Randomized TriHard Emerald

"Bro, the Voices being cringe right now or what?"

^Source "The Tail of Vu (Part I)" by AUThorTheAuthor

"Thanks for all the memes..."

— "' ' ..., Twitch Plays Pokémon Randomized TriHard Emerald

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 Randomized TriHard Emerald is the fifth run of Season 9, as well as the second randomized run of the season and twelfth randomized run overall, which began on August 20th, 2022, and ended on August 26th, 2022. The run played as a twist on the original Twitch Plays Pokémon TriHard Emerald, using an updated version of the game titled Pokémon TriHard Emerald DX and throwing in randomized Pokémon locations, movesets, abilities, and evolutions. Nonetheless, the same rules as the original run apply:

1. The Pokémon Storage System is inaccessible; Pokémon are immediately sent to it after fainting.
2. Poké Balls are available for free, but cannot be used if the party is full.
3. The save option has been removed; the game instead saves automatically each time a Pokémon Center is visited.
4. In the event of a white out, the game automatically resets and loads the latest save.

The Voices once again picked a female protagonist, which they named "' ' ... (often referred to as "Quotes" by players), and chose a Growlithe as their starter, which very appropriately evolved into Entei, aka the Mascot Legendary of TriHard Emerald. Like her predecessor, she is an ex-member of Team Skull freshly embarked on a brand new journey after moving from Alola to Hoenn, who before long proceeds to join the ranks of Team Aqua. Along the way, she ends up ransacking as many houses, shops and Pokémon Centers as possible, and even finding ways to cheat at Pokémon Contests, but also suffering her fair share of heartbreaking losses.

This was also the first run during which players could spend Channel Points in order to have short clips of popular memes play in the corner of the stream, a feature that had already been implemented during the preceding Pokémon Battle Revolution intermission, as well as the first one to award stream badges upon seeing a Pokémon for the first time rather than catching it due to the very limited amount of catching possible.

See also here for the archived status of the run.

Note: Tropes relating to the original TriHard Emerald hack are to be listed on the latter's run page instead of here.

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Twitch Plays TriHard Emerald contains examples of:

• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: The protagonist visited Logan's house while he was away, and proceeded to ransack the place, eventually leaving with $5000, a Blue Flute, and two bottles of Moomoo Milk from the fridge.

• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • During Day 4, the item bag started showing signs of not working quite right, with pages taking a long time to load before appearing filled with highly corrupted text graphics◊, and various interface glitches occurring upon exiting. This eventually resulted a few hours later in the game completely freezing up upon opening the Items pocket, followed by the Streamer loading savestate after savestate trying to find one where the crash didn't occur. While initially thought to be caused by a corrupt item, it was eventually figured out that the issue was caused by having too many items, which caused the list to overflow and start overwriting other parts of the memory. The Streamer took over in order to toss and sell a bunch of useless items, allowing the game to finally resume.
  • Upon returning to the Lilycove City Contest Hall after earning victory in a Master-rank Contest, the protagonist was greeted by an invisible artist who declared that he had painted a portrait of her Pokémon. Upon showing the painting however, the game completely crashed, showing nothing more than a black screen, while the team display vanished as well as garbage data caused fainted Lv.0 Pokémon with question mark sprites and either empty or randomly-spaced single-letter nicknames to rapidly appear and disappear from it, as well as be added to the PC on the run status page. Then after a few moments, the music started to become horribly distorted, and stream badges were distributed out of nowhere for Sentret, Unown, Kirlia, and Miltank.

• Gender Bender: Due to the differences in gender ratio between species, some Pokémon ended up changing gender upon evolution. Those included a female Mareep evolving into a male Elekid, a male Totodile evolving into a female Wailmer, and most notably a male Nidorino evolving into a female Nidoqueen.

• Glitch Entity:
  • After making use of an exploit to get a painting done of an NPC's Seedot◊, players went to the Lilycove Museum where said painting was to be exposed. Upon doing so, they discovered that only had the painting changed from a Smartness Contest painting to a Coolness Contest painting, it also featured a default "question mark" Pokémon in lieu of Seedot◊.
  • After reading a bunch of garbage data due to the game crashing, and because it is set to not update the data for empty PC boxes in the case of TriHard Emerald, the run status page ended up mistakenly listing about two dozens glitch Pokémon being stored inside the PC◊, all of them of the "??????????" species and displaying an Egg as their sprite, at Lv.0 with no stats or moves, and with nicknames that were either empty or randomly-spaced variations of "À".

• Good Bad Bugs: invoked
  • Due to catching being extremely limited as per the rules of TriHard Emerald, no stream badges were distributed upon catching a species for the first time during the original run. This time, stream badges were instead distributed upon seeing a species for the first time rather than catching it; however, the "Seen" counter was initially reseted upon whiting out, making it possible for stream badges to drop again for a species that was first seen between the last save and the white out. This was quickly corrected to ensure stream badges only dropped once, but later restored due to the correction actually causing more problems, as it resulted in the memory dumping entire gigabytes of logs upon seeing and unseeing Pokémon at once.
  • TriHard Emerald makes it possible to enter any Contest category from any Contest Hall. The Voices figured a way to exploit this in order to obtain a painting of one of their Pokémon while bypassing the requirement of actually winning a Master Rank Contest with said Pokémon; as the event of getting the painting is only triggered when returning to the Contest Hall lobby of Lilycove City, aka the only one in which Master Rank Contest can normally be entered, they first returned to Staleport City to enter and win a Master Rank Beauty Contest with Entei, then entered a Normal Rank Smartness Contest with Latias, before finally going back to Lilycove City. Upon re-entering the Contest Hall, the event was indeed triggered by the former while resulting in a painting of the latter's winner, in this case an NPC's Seedot.
    Painter: I did a painting of your Pokémon to commemorate its victory...
    Tustin2121: yep, totally mine dude

• Never Grew Up: On Day 2, the Voices found a Moon Stone that they used to evolve vvu, the team's Skitty, which had the extremely useful ability Pure Power that doubled its attack stat. Its evolution turned out however to be a Wigglytuff with the much less useful ability Lightningrod, arguably making the evolution an actual downgrade. They thus purposefully caused a white out to return to the previous save point before it evolved, and used the Moon Stone on Nidorino instead, keeping vvu as a Skitty until it met its demise during the battle against Norman.

• Persona Non Grata: After attempting to shoplift in plain sight of the vendor, Quotes ended up permanently banned from the shop in Staleport City.
  Wahi: at least we're not being electrocuted and our name changed to THIEF

• Rainbow Speak: During the long rant that took place in front of the PC in Mossdeep City, colored text was used for the words "Petalburg", "Nurse" and "Wailmer Pail", as well as in the part stating: "It doesn't say why it's a bucket. It doesn't say how it could be a bucket. It just says that it is.".

• Ret-Gone:
  • Early in the run, Skitty fainted in battle, and the chat decided to white out on purpose in order to go back to the last save. A Togepi was caught in the process, and was thus lost upon reverting. On the run status page, it is listed in its own category separate from Pokémon that have fallen in battle, labeled "The Lost"^note It shares that category with a Horsea that was simply traded away.
  • Upon using a Moon Stone on Skitty, it was revealed that it evolved into a Wigglytuff that lost the Pure Power ability in favor of Lightningrod, which was actually a downgrade from before. As a result, it was decided to white out in order to revert to a checkpoint before the evolution took place, and Skitty remained unevolved until it perished in battle while facing Norman.

• Shout-Out: Checking the PC in Mossdeep City triggered a long narrated rant about how it was actually a bucket.
  Narrator: I don't quite know how to tell you this, "' ' ..., but that PC is actually a bucket. Oh, don't give me that look. I have no explanation for you. I've no idea how a PC can be a bucket. Look, all it says right here is: "There's a PC in the corner, but it's actually a bucket." End of quote. It's all I have. It doesn't say why it's a bucket. It doesn't say how it could be a bucket. It just says that it is. I'm sorry, "' ' .... I really am. I know you've been looking all over for a usable PC for this entire game. And here we are, finally a PC with no excuse, and it turns out to be a bucket. It's a very convincing PC, what with the glowing screen and whirring noises, but it unfortunately is just a bucket. It could carry your Pokémon for you, but only insomuch as you can fit them inside the physical confines of the machine. It cannot access the Pokémon Storage System for you. Frankly, there is no such thing. It's been deleted. Released, as you might say. Sorry to rub it in like that. I hoped that the man in Petalburg would have convinced you, but there is absolutely no way to get your Pokémon back. That's how it is. That's life. Besides, this PC isn't even a very good bucket to begin with. If you filled it with water, it'd leak out all the vent holes! Not to mention the electrocution risk. An absolute travesty of a bucket this thing is. Take it with- Take it with you!? No of course you can't take it with you. It's bolted to the wall. Besides, I doubt the Nurse would let you walk off with her PC. Sure, you and I know it's a bucket, but how would you convince anyone else? No no, it'd never work. Besides, what use have you for a leaky bucket? You have a perfectly good Wailmer Pail. Let's leave the bucket alone, "' ' .... After all, you've got a game to get back to. I'll be pulling for you every step of the way. Hurry along now! Good luck!

• Unfortunate Names: A Weedle caught early on was named " ngga", which the chat quickly decided to interpret as "Naga" rather than the most... unfortunate interpretation of said name. It's name was manually reset to "Weedle" by one of the developers a few minutes later.

• The Unpronounceable: The name of the protagonist was composed solely of periods and quotation marks, making it quite unclear how one was supposed to say it out loud; players usually referred to her as "Quotes" or "Echo" as a result.

• We Hardly Knew Ye:
  • The first catch of the run was a Spearow, which lasted only about three minutes and a half on the team before being taken down by a Marill during a Trainer Battle, making it the first lost Pokémon of the run as well.
  • After Nidoqueen was taken down in an unexpected Double Battle, it was first replaced by a Lunatone received at the Weather Institute, which was taken out by a wild Pokémon only 42 minutes later. The next replacement for it was a Poliwrath, which itself fainted to another wild Pokémon a mere 6 minutes after.

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