The Pokémon Company responds to claims it doesn’t want players doing Nuzlocke runs

After reports surfaced suggesting The Pokémon Company does not support its creators completing Nuzlocke runs of their games, the Pokemon devs have moved to refute the claims.

Thanks to a report by PokeBeach webmaster Joe Merrick, who spoke to The Pokemon Company International, it appears there is no issue with fans or creators taking part in these unique playthroughs.

Nuzlocke runs are different from regular playthroughs of Pokémon games as they require the player to stick to a strict ruleset. Typically this includes no longer using Pokémon after they have fainted and other capture-related challenges.

Over the weekend the discussion around these runs kicked off after creators Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang, who host the Nintendo Minute YouTube show, said The Pokémon Company had taken issue with their suggestions to perform a Nuzlocke run on-stream.

“We thought this would be a great idea for a Nintendo Minute video,” they said. “So we pitched it to The Pokémon Company saying ‘Hey, we would like to do a Nuzlocke run, what do you think?’”

“We thought they were going to fire us. They said ‘we consider this to be on the same level as using a hacked game, ROM hacks’. I was like, excuse me? This is the style of playing a game that everybody can buy, there’s no hacking.”

Going further, the pair suggested creators in the past had been removed from the Pokémon creator program after playing Nuzlocke. Of course, this has been disputed by The Pokémon Company’s statement to Serebi.net.

It would appear that Pokemon players and creators should be okay to play Nuzlocke as much as they want, as long as they stick to what is possible out of the box.