Black 2 Kingslocke: Episode 5

Rules are here, and if you’re interested in hearing about the tribulations of other trainers suffering through this ridiculous challenge run I’ve created, check out the current season of the Exp. Share podcast!

Now, where were we? Oh, right – on the way to Driftveil City.

You can actually find wild Pokémon on the Driftveil Drawbridge itself, so…

Knight – Challenge: Choose one of your current party Pokémon to fight every trainer battle solo until you have won at least five (not counting rematches) and drawn another card. If it ever loses, it is disgraced and must be boxed until another card revokes this rule. If it wins every battle, it becomes your champion and ignores all other rules and restrictions. Either way, drawing another Knight ends all effects of this card and issues a new challenge.

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Black 2 Kingslocke: Episode 4

Time to get moving again – we’re leaving Castelia City. Of course, first we have to pass through the suburbs, and that means…

Oof – this again.

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Black 2 Kingslocke: Episode 3

The first segment of the Pokéstar Studios subplot is obligatory for progressing the story, because we need to get Roxie’s dad the ferry captain out of the film industry and back onto his boat so he can take us to Castelia City. I actually think making movies at Pokéstar Studios is a pretty cool little minigame, but it’s not relevant to the Kingslocke, so I won’t be discussing anything that happens here. Let’s just skip ahead to…

A confrontation at the docks between gym leader Roxie, dear innocent rival Hugh and a group of Mysterious Masked Thugs. We just learned about making movies, so obviously we all know that this is a moment we have to draw a card for dramatic effect if nothing else.

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Black 2 Kingslocke: Episode 2

While not technically a new “route” in the game’s own terms, the part of route 20 at the bottom of these stairs is inaccessible until after you’ve defeated Cheren, and it has different and higher-level wild Pokémon. In the past, I’ve normally treated situations like that as new “areas” for Kingslocke purposes.

Ten – Rule Card: An observer to the game may revoke any or all (or none) of the rules currently affecting you, AND free any or all (or none) of your petrified Pokémon, AND either make up a new rule or change an existing one. If no observers are available, you may revoke one rule.

Now there’s a twist… let’s see what Jim the Editor has in store for me.

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Black 2 Kingslocke: Episode 1

It begins.

The rules – for those who dare to read them – are here.

Just as a little bit of housekeeping: as with my Pearl Kingslocke, I’m playing on an emulator and using one of the features of the Universal Pokémon Randomiser to give alternate evolution methods to Pokémon that normally have to be traded, like Boldore and Gurdurr. The game is otherwise unmodified. Black 2 and White 2 have some interesting features if you link them up with a completed save on the original Black and White, but I’m not going to be talking much about the story on this run anyway, and playing on an emulator makes it easier to get screenshots. To be honest, I also don’t 100% remember whether my White 2 game card has Pokémon on it that I might want to keep (…probably not, but not sure?).

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Black 2 Kingslocke

As you may have picked up if you, for some godawful reason, pay attention to my Twitter: the extremely good boys of the Exp. Share podcast, who play through Pokémon games in tandem and discuss their adventures each week, are currently running Black 2 and White 2 with my “Kingslocke” rules, after the idea was put into their head by my good friend Ben from I Chews You (the podcast about cooking and eating Pokémon, I LIKE WHAT I LIKE, OKAY!?). As well as being a nice treat for any fans of the Kingslocke who want to see someone else suffer through this ludicrously complicated tarot-based challenge run, this is a fantastic opportunity for me to get more data on how the rules actually function in practice and where they might be confusing or easily misunderstood (well… more confusing than they’re supposed to be). I still haven’t played under the revised version that I wrote after completing my Pearl run a few months back, so this is pretty valuable information if I want to keep updating the rules, or follow through on my threats to create an “advanced” version where the four suits all do different things.

Of course, seeing as Josh and Tanner of Exp. Share are doing something so helpful for me, I think it’s only polite if I join in. Again, after all, I haven’t yet played with the most recent version of the rules myself. Exp. Share has a segment called “Level Check,” where the hosts discuss the current state of their teams (including recent casualties if they’ve been playing a Nuzlocke… etc.). A lot of listeners keep pace with Tanner and Josh playing through the same game and post their own Level Checks on Reddit each week, so I’m going to start a run of Black 2, try to catch up to them reasonably promptly (I believe they normally tackle one gym per week, and they’ve just passed the third in Castelia City) and then keep pace for the rest of their run. This should be a lot less intense than my almost-daily updates on the Pearl Kingslocke, and the posts will probably be a lot less detailed (at least the first few while I’m catching up), which is good because I’m also still playing Legends: Arceus and have ideas I need to discuss about that game too. I’m not going to take time to talk much about Black 2 itself or the story (I’ll assume readers know the plot and characters), or give detailed accounts of most major battles; instead I’ll just focus on what’s happening with the Kingslocke cards and deck, with periodic updates on how my team is doing in the spirit of Level Check. Also, if I need an observer rule I’m just going to go to Jim the Editor rather than crowdsource it like I did for Pearl (not that that wasn’t also great, but I want to come up with a more refined system before doing it again; this is just more convenient given my format).