If you told me last week that I’d spend nearly four hours of my weekend watching a man tackle a NuzlockePokemongame, I’d have said, “h*ck yeah!” Mostly because I live for long old video essays andhardcore Nuzlockes, but also because I knew that this one was special. I knew I was in for a treat, and YouTuber Jan ‘pChal’ Krüger provided the goods.
You may know him asPokemon Challenges. You may know him as pChal since his relatively recent rebrand. You may know him as Jan if you’ve got a weird parasocial thing going on. But most people know him as the best Nuzlocker in the world.
The Fall And Rise Of pChal
Even when he falls into a rut, pChal’s videos are interesting. They’re not exciting or YouTube-defining, but they’re entertaining nonetheless. 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 he would describe as stagnation and most other people would call normal YouTubing, pChal rises from 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 something 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 parents are actually incredibly supportive of me and my chosen career, despite not understanding it in the slightest. 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 makereallygood. 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 challenging 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 certainly 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 before 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 world 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 Run & 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.
