Dungeon-by-dungeon breakdown of the 2:37 BRT No QS No WM PB

Dungeon-by-dungeon breakdown of my 2:37 BRT No QS No WM PB:

- Tiny Woods #1: Almost set Tail Whip on Squirtle, good job idiot. I guess resetting so often and doing so many missions in TWoods started to get to me, as it became pretty frequent for me to screw up that menuing over the last few attempts.

- Thunderwave Cave #1: Not bad for my "first casual playthrough of BRT." In all seriousness, just glad it was well-executed, as I choke movement all the time in TWC for some reason.

- Tiny Woods #2: Good client spawns for once! :O

- Mt. Steel #1: Usually you grab orbs if you want to save up for a Frustration TM, but I ended up just grabbing a crapload of money outright-- so much, that I didn't even sell the Pecha Scarf later. Also apparently I can't count Squirtle's Bubble PP anymore. Dungeon must've been pretty good if Squirtle only ran out of Bubbles at the very end though, at least by my standards.

- Thunderwave Cave #2: All regular missions. Decided to pick up a Sleep Seeed on my way through because earlier I had a run die to a Deliver Sleep Seed mission. It ended up paying off later! Also good client rewards.

- Tiny Woods #3: I don't remember anything about this split at all.

- Sinister Woods: Played a little inefficiently, but had decent stairs luck and made it through relatively fast. Gengar fight went as well as it could have for getting paralyzed immediately.

- Before Silent Chasm: Found a near mission for an Escape Orb on the boards, so I checked purple kek for one. SURPRISE! He had a Frustration TM. Had to unequip the Pecha Scarf and sell that to afford both the orb and the TM. Good thing I didn't buy any revives at green kek before Sinister Woods; usually I do that if I don't have Frustration yet, but he had nothing.

- Silent Chasm: Free as heck with Frustration. Good thing, too. No Power Band or Special Band, though...

- Mt. Thunder: Absolutely awful; lost a minute to my PB even though that PB did not have Frust. For some reason this dungeon was awful to me for this whole entire multi-month-long grind. This would have been yet another reset if I didn't have Frust to make this go by faster.
Found like three Special Bands at least. Looking back, I could have played a little better in terms of navigation.

- Great Canyon: Turns out Mt. Thunder was so bad, that I learned Doubleslap immediately. Decided to keep going with Frust+Tackle anyways, due to it being more consistent. Dungeon was over with pretty fast, with a 54:xx exit time (that's one of the only dungeon exit times that I pay attention to for some reason). For having Frust, that's not great, but 54 was totally fine for my standards.

- Lapis Cave: I'm guessing I saved so much time because I didn't shop before coming here? Usually this dungeon doesn't vary much due to its small layouts, so idk what happened.

- Mt. Blaze: All I remember is getting rekt by a Fearow. This was especially upsetting to see happen on a Frust run.

- Forsty Forest: I always lose a bunch of time here to my PB, but this time I was just glad that a Furret didn't wreck my face. Sadly saw no revives in the grotto, and still no Power Band. Rock-types were unusually troublesome because of no Tail Whip and no Power Band. Played the Articuno fight safely with two Attracts.

- Mt. Freeze: Excellent. Didn't forget to kick Absol off the team on either entrance, didn't accidentally take Snowy Path, found a revive, finally found my Power Band. Even the peak was excellent.

- Thunderwave Cave #3: Good thing I decided to grab that Sleep Seed earlier. Though in hindsight, if I hadn't grabbed the Sleep Seed, I probably would have just tossed that mission for a potentially better one anyways. And then maybe I wouldn't have needed to carry four mission items through the entire fugitive arc.

- Uproar Forest: Tried going a little out of my way to recruit Aipoms, but sadly didn't get one, and did not get a double chestnut... Thankfully, both runs through the dungeon went pretty fast, at about 3 minutes each instead of the usual 4 or 5.

- Mt. Steel #2: Pretty bad stair luck at first, but having two Near missions led to a GOLD. And finally relieved me of carrying around so many mission items.

- Tiny Woods #4: Apparently reading was not my strong suit this run. I thought I had another near mission here, but it was a deliver. Luckily this was just TWoods, so it's not like it made a super big difference. Sadly don't think I got any revives from clients, and I was really hoping for them.

- Magma Cavern: Was relatively average, except that one floor with the Grimer shenanigans. That was garbage. Also had one monster house that I walked away from, and found my least favorite item in PMD: the Warp Scarf. Thankfully only lost one revive the whole dungeon, especially since I only had four. I always lose time to PB here.

- Before Sky Tower: Tried checking green kek one last time for revives since I only had three. Only got food and one more Heal Seed. In hindsight, really wish I would have checked purple kek too; only had one monster house orb.

- SKY TOWER: Finally remembered to re-enable Squirtle's linked moves right away. Dungeon was pretty troll-ey for the first 10 floors (good thing I brought two Heal Seeds and had Bite on Squirtle), but the pace picked up afterwards, setting me up for a GOLD. Used my Petrify Orb on a 21F monster house, and then got one more monster house in the stair room on 25F... this was terrible to deal with without orbs, but somehow I survived fighting all those Venomoths in the corridor. I thought about trying to run around, but the last time I tried that in this situation, it ended very poorly because of Agility on Aerodactyls. Still, this single-handedly threw the run off course, so I entered the summit behind PB, knowing I had only one option...

- Sky Summit: I did the unthinkable; I put on the Warp Scarf. I have a terrible history with this item, but turns out that it is indeed super broken in Sky Summit. I struggled a bit at first, as I underestimated how hard the map would be to read, but by 4F I got the hang of it, and disdainfully GOLDED the summit, pulling me just ahead of PB at the last second. Played Rayquaza safe despite having revives just to seal the deal.


All in all, this was quite the journey. I came back to this category purely seeking pride (and because I didn't have time to grind longer categories); I'd always despised this category because of its immense luck factor, and was irritated by the massive time difference between the WR and my own run. Naturally, I was not having fun at first, and resorted to playing other categories like True Ending and All Icons when I could, just to force myself to finish out more runs. The game gave me terrible run after terrible run after terrible run; little else. But as time went on, I finally started to learn from each attempt, improve the accuracy and speed of my movement, master the menuing, and play much more efficiently and confidently than ever before. Rather than get sick of the grind, I finally started to feel truly comfortable with this category. I would keep grinding further, but I'm too anxious to wait on tackling other PMD categories any longer. This run shows how much I've improved simply by virtue of beating my old 2:38 without needing double chestnut, and I'll take that for now, even if I know I can do a little better, both in terms of execution and RNG.

Farewell for now, BRT.