the battle tower ribbons took up the MAJORITY of this ordeal. like, out of the roughly... uh... 30? 40? hours of playtime i spent doing all of this, the battle tower easily took up over half of them. there's 6 ribbons to get here, two for singles and then one for doubles, doubles while fighting with an NPC, doubles while fighting with another player (or yourself if you have two dses!), and singles against user-uploaded teams over wifi. in all of them you have to get to a 50 streak. well, in singles, a 49 streak, but i digress.
if you lose at any point you go straight back to the beginning, 0, and you can't reset when you lose, either. the game will detect it and disqualify your challenge. it was extremely time consuming and there were multiple times i was on the edge of my seat during some close calls.
i don't have footage for every ribbon i got since i was so focused i forgot to take any on shit like doubles and multi /w AI, forgive me lmao
this was the 49th battle in my singles streak, getting me the Great Ability Ribbon. i had already gotten the Ability Ribbon earlier in the streak. i saved the battle video in-game and put my save on emulator to record it with OBS which is how the footage is so clear. god i wish i had a capture card. also btw i stay in with registeel to break that heatran's focus sash jsyk
anyways, this was the first true close call i had the entire way through due to that crit on salamence from regigigas. i was horrified and thought i had lost, but then NEVERHAPPY SOMEHOW CLUTCHED IT OUT DESPITE HER SHITTY STATS. I WAS SCREAMING. that's when i realized she didn't have to sit in the back for the entirety of battles, she might actually come in use!!
and she DID come in use because oh god the wifi battle tower rooms had a bunch of hacked pokemon. neverhappy's leech seed stalling got me through every single sheer cold machamp with no guard, every single wonder guard spiritomb, and more. absolute fucking legend. i'm so proud of her. (also i did the ribbon for double battles between these two videos btw. no footage cause i fucking Forgot. then after this i did the multi /w an NPC ribbon which uh. i also forgot to take video of DFJISDFK)
after that began True Hell. Nightmare. Pain.
so uh, this became my life for 8 hours! for the pair ability ribbon you have to get a streak of 50 with another player. you can't turn battle animations off and you can't spam A through text. you must suffer. and my dumb ass decided to do this all in one day like a fool. a buffoon. the length of one turn could be up to a minute just because of how SLOW gen 4 is. the health bars are EVEN WORSE
this is also where i found out that i couldn't use two suicunes even if i distributed one onto each file. i was using my pearl to host since diamond/pearl had slightly easier movesets to fight against and dumber AI, then platinum for my second game. i had a horrifying close call where i won battle... 47? if i remember correctly, with only latibreak remaining on red HP. then battle 49 had four legendaries. i was terrified
...and you can tell from these screenshots of me liveposting the entirety of battle 49 to a friend. ASJDFIASDF. i had been playing for 7-8 hours at that point and i was so scared i'd have to do it all again. (also, i consumed like four video essays that day while waiting for animations to play. man.)
you have no idea the amount of EUPHORIA i felt pulling off the final hit. this was actually battle 56 and not battle 50 because the battle tower is in sets of 7 and i wanted to keep my streak, so i persevered. i collapsed back into bed, feeling the most exhaustion and also the most pride i have ever felt from a pokemon game, mostly because i did it all in one sitting and i was just so glad to be done. it wasn't harder than the other parts of the battle tower, it just took so much willpower LMAO
after taking a break after this ORDEAL that took me over a week of on and off gameplay, i nabbed some of the other easy ribbons i hadn't grabbed, like all of the daily ribbons from Sunyshore, the legend ribbon for defeating red on mt. silver (easy when you have multiple level 100s on your save), and grinded money to get all the ribbon syndicate ribbons.
after that, there was only one thing left to do... contests.
