It’s hard to believe that it’s only been several months since Twitch Plays Pokemon began. Seems like it’s been around forever. Although if you watched this last season, then you know exactly what forever can feel like. If Season 1 was about finding the one true God, and Season 2 was about how men can conquer those oppressive Gods, then Season 3’s subtitle should have been “Oh my God, are we there yet?!?!?!”. What started as a heartwarming story of love soon turned into spam, spam and more spam. So what in the Hoenn Region went wrong?

Lovely Beginnings:

It started the same as any other play through. We met our hero – this time heroine – and gave her the name A. A picked Torchic as her starter and began on her journey to become a Pokemon Master. Along the way she capture a Marill and many Poochyena – maybe too many. Then came the day everyone was fearing, Bloody Sunday.

The first Sunday after the play through started marked the exact one-month anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the day when we released twelve Pokemon by accident while trying to remove our recently captured Zapdos from the PC. Everyone expected bloodshed and more casualties, especially the release of our adorable Torchic whom we had named Zexy. Though amazingly, no one was lost.

This became the day we beat the spammers and everyone hoping to cause chaos. It was a time of thankfulness, celebration, and of course a time of love. Although these feelings would soon pass, because what followed was a fate worse than accidental release – but the accidental release would still be a part of it too.

Descent Into Self Destruction:

We might not have released ‘Zexy’ – our Torchic – on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, but he was released not long afterwards. This marked the beginning of the Age of the Bots. Whether by bots or manually, a slew of spammers came in and constantly spammed ‘select’ – as well as ‘Up’ and ‘Right’. It got so bad at some points that even Democracy Mode wouldn’t have helped us. Due to the overwhelming number of spammed commands, they still would have had the majority at certain points.

Releasing a Pokemon is fine; we’ve come back from it before. This time however, it actually dragged out the progression of the game to a mind-numbingly slow pace. It took us almost five days to get our 3^rd badge, while in Crystal we were already on our way to our 8^th. It got so long in fact, that Twitch Plays Pokemon Emerald actually ended before we beat the game. Luckily, the creator of Twitch Plays Pokemon showed off his awesomeness and sense of humor, and gave plays another chance:

“So it looks like I overestimated everyone’s ability to finish Pokemon Emerald, the time limit was never intended as a hard limit, I’m going to to add a few days, sorry to everyone who tuned in for Fire Red, please come back in a few days . . . . this is all your fault for not exceeding my expectations consistently enough” – TwitchPlaysPokemon

Compared to past play throughs, this was almost embarrassing. For a large part of the game our team consisted of one ridiculously powerful Azumarill whose levels quickly were passing 70 and a team of undertrained common Pokemon. Last time around people went crazy because they thought LazerGator – our Feraligatr – was overpowered, but Azumarill was actually our only good Pokemon.

Coming Together – And Still Failing:

After a lot of training – and countless attempted at the Elite Four – we finally got a decent team lead by Azumarill who had reached Level 100. Sadly, it STILL wasn’t enough. If would still be a few more days until our team came out victorious. So how bad was it?

In past play thoughs we always defeated the Elite Four with a bunch of decently leveled Pokemon and one or two that were surprisingly under leveled. This time around we had a Level 100 Pokemon – which was a first for not only Twitch play through, but also for many watching. In addition to him, we had three Pokemon around Levels 70-80, and two around Level 50. Past play throughs we were lucky to have one Pokemon in the 50s by time we reached the Elite Four.

We had trained so much that our Pokemon’s levels far exceeded any past attempts by Twitch or individual players; but still we couldn’t win. With spam and horrendous Move-Sets, we were just asking for it. And with no hourly democracy mode to enter, there truly was no hope but to just keep beating the dead horse.

Conclusion:

Everything that I usually enjoy about Twitch Plays Pokemon is the story that develops around it, but this time there was nothing for fans to work with. It very quickly became a waste of time that just made you want to go into the corner and cry – which is appropriate because our character was usually stuck in a corner somewhere.

Despite these hardships, there was still some great fan art by people who tried to make the most out of the situation. Although Twitch needs to take it back from the bots, but I don’t know how this can be done. All this season did was reaffirm the feelings I got when I played my first Generation 3 Pokemon game many years ago: Generation 2 was truly the best.

Anyway, as always here’s the best artwork and memes from Twitch’s talented fans for this season. Nothing as great as the last two, but again: fans didn’t have a lot to work with.