If you told me last week that I’d spend nearly four hours of my weekend watching a man tackle a Nuzlocke Pokemon game, I’d have said, “h*ck yeah!” Mostly because I live for long old video essays and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:hardcore Nuzlockes, but also because I knew that this one was special. I knew I was in for 💛a treat, and YouTuber Jan ‘pChal’ Krüg🍌er provided the goods.

You may know him as 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pokemon Challenges. You may know him as pChal since his relatively recent rebrand. You may know him as J𒁃an if you’ve got a we𝕴ird parasocial thing going on. But most people know him as the best Nuzlocker in the world.

Whether true or not, pChal used to self-describe as such at the start of every video, and it was a plausible claim. He was one of the leading Nuzlockers in the world, or at the veryཧ least on YouTube and had put in the time to prove it. However, he let his lead slip. Whatever accolades he may have lauded over his rivals have fallen to the wayside as he’s dived deeper into a League of Legends-shaped hole, only returning to his Nuzlocke content when sponsors come a-knocking.

The Fall And Rise Of pChal

I’m not being harsh here – Krüger admits to it in his own videos. pChal is ve💎ry upfront about his situation as a content creator. Sometimes, he phones in 𝓀a video. Sometimes, he doesn’t feel like the best Nuzlocker in the world, but he still says it to save face. Sometimes, he badly disguises sponsored videos with clickbait titles.

His sponsored videos are annoying in isolation, but pChal’s honesty surrounding them is refreshing. In his recent vi🅰deo describing his Sisyphean attempt to beat Pokemon Run & Bun, a difficulty hack for Pokemon Emerald that just 56 players are recorded to have ever beaten, he dives into self-reflection about his abilities and his channel. It’s interesting, it’s fourth wall-breaking, it’s why pChal’s videos hit different to any others.

Even when he falls into a rut, pChal’s videos are interesting. They’re not exciting or YouTube-defining, but they’re entertaining nonetheless൲. Barring that one clickbait example, I’ve never left his channel disappointed per se, but when he drops a three-and-a-half-hour video essay featuring readings of Siddhartha and its own anime intro, he takes things to a level no other Nuzlocke YouTuber can compete with.

After a year of what he𒀰 would describe as stagnation and most other people would call normal YouTubing, pChal rises fro🗹m mediocrity with a masterpiece. This video, entitled simply ‘Only 56 People Have Beaten This Pokemon Game’ is about trying to beat Run & Bun, but it’s also about introspection, about the Nuzlocke meta, about the struggles of content creation. And, put simply, it’s really fl*pping relatable.

Often, when I tell people what I do for a living, they respond with somet♔hing along the lines of, “Omg, you’re living the dream!” Unless those people are my parents, in which case they say something more akin to, “Grow up and stop playing video games, you imbecile, couldn’t you be a doctor or something useful?” But the reality is much different.

My pare😼nts are actually incredibly supportive of me and my chosen career, despite not understanding it in the sl🍰ightest. Sorry for making you the butt of that joke, Mum and Dad.

As cool as this job is and as much as I don’t take it for granted, no, we don’t get to play games on the clock. Yes, we do a whole lot of unpaid overtime. We have a quota of articles to hit each day. A lot of my time is spent curating spreadsheets and looking༺ at graphs. I’m very rarely totally satisfied with the articles I publish.

But then, once in a while, you’ll create something that you’re proud of. Something that you managed to find the time to make really good. Something that feels important to yourself and to other people. That may be an interview with an indie developer or a review of a particularly ch𒊎allenging game, but whatever it is, the feeling is unparalleled. And I feel that same pride emanating from pChal when he produces an hours-long Nuzlocke compilation-cum-video essay.

Pokemon Run & Bun

Personally, I would say that pChal is more of a livestreamer than a YouTuber now. He certaไinly is if you measure his work by quantity. He streamed nearly all of his Run & Bun gameplay, which took dozens, if not hundreds, of hours and only produced a single three-and-a-half hour YouTube video on it.

He’ll spend the entirety of an eight-hour stream looking at spreadsheets and damage calcs beꦏfore taking on a single trainer. Pokemon Run & Bun is a game of preparation. You need to perfectly prepare for every single battle, managing your party, their moves, and their training in order to survive. The very first route is impossible to defeat without utilising the Oran Berries you collect along the way. If you’re not meticulous, you will fail. Best Nuzlocker in the world𝔍 or not.

But pChal’s eye for preparation in-game has rubbed off on his video skills, too. He says he spent months working on the script for the ℱRun &🔯; Bun video, and it’s tighter than a battle against the Elite Four. The production value is off the charts, and the credits show how many people worked so hard to create this 199-minute masterpiece.

The video itself🎐 varies wildly with each chapter; explaining the basics of Nuzlocke gameplay at the beginning, getting into meta encounter strategies by the end, and veering through personal problems and difficult battles along the😼 way. Heck, there are even three fake adverts for the kinds of stuff YouTubers like Krüger tend to flog.

Every so often, you watch a YouTube video that feels like the peak of its subgenre. The best Pokemon VGC report. The best Let’s Play. But this doesn’t feel like that. This feels like pChal breaking into his stride. It’s not the beဣginning of his YouTube journey – the man has nearly a million subscribers at the time of writing – but it’s not the pinnacle. pChal may have reached the top of the first mount🌃ain, but a whole range has opened up in front of him. If he can keep making videos like this, nobody will care whether or not he’s the best Nuzlocker in the world. Because he’s the most entertaining. And that counts for something, right?