Pokemon Scarlet Gameplay Speedrun 100 Percent Completion

How I Ran Pokemon Scarlet 100 Percent in Under 13 Hours

The basic structure is simpler than most people think. You need the eight gym badges, you need to clear Victory Road, then go through the main story boss fights, clear the three Team Star bases in a specific order, do the Champion's Cup, beat the final boss, and then tackle the post-game content including the Academy Ace Tournament and the New Path story. The game counts completion based on a combination of main story progression and Pokemon encyclopedia entries, so you have to catch enough species for the dex to reach a certain threshold before the final cutscene. I started my first serious run using a mono-ghost core with Gholdengo, Bramblin, and Chien-Pao as the main damage dealers. Bramblin is still available as a roaming encounter on the surface of area four after midnight if you know where to position yourself. Getting one early means you can skip most of the special-forme grass-type encounters entirely, which saves roughly twenty to thirty minutes depending on how many route changes you need to make. The critical thing most speedrunners miss is that you don't need every single Pokemon for 100 percent completion. The game only requires you to fill about 70 percent of the Pokédex, which means catching around 140 species is enough if you have all the main story encounters covered. This is a massive difference from the original games where people spent hours hunting for specific encounters. You can check your progress at any pokemon center by talking to the npc near the healing station.

One specific problem I ran into during my second attempt was that a friend gift Pokemon was marked as "not caught" even though I had it in my party. The game's internal counter doesn't recognize traded Pokemon as dex entries until they appear in your own party box after a certain point. The workaround is simple: just transfer the Pokemon to your own save data using the menu, then the entry registers. This caused me to lose about twelve minutes of additional grinding on that run. The Gym Leader routing matters more than most people realize. If you hit them in the recommended order, you are fighting against much lower level Pokemon early on, which means less time spending potions and more time just moving forward. But there is a counter-intuitive shortcut: if you beat the grass gym and the normal gym first, you unlock a route that lets you access several area four dungeons much faster than the normal progression would allow. This opens up the ability to catch certain species earlier, which helps with the dex completion requirement. Victory Road is the section that eats the most time in most runs. The trainers are spaced out in a way that forces you to battle through a long gauntlet before reaching the league. I learned to use a single mon with high speed stats and a coverage move set rather than switching constantly. One mon with Ice Shard, Shadow Ball, and Thunder Punch can clear about eighty percent of Victory Road without needing to heal between battles.

The Team Star base order is another place where people waste time. The game gives you a suggested order, but if you go dark first, then fire, then water, you can actually access the boss arena much faster because the area unlocks differently depending on which base you clear first. It sounds minor but the time savings add up to roughly eight minutes across the whole run. I should mention that 100 percent completion also requires defeating all the Elite Four members and then beating the Champion, which means spending additional time on specific legendary Pokemon encounters. The game has a mechanic where certain Pokemon only appear during specific weather conditions, and if you miss one, you have to wait for the weather to cycle or reload a save. This is where the run can fall apart for a lot of people. The final piece is the Academy Ace Tournament, which is essentially a bonus gauntlet. It is not required for the main 100 percent flag, but some versions of the completion count include it. I found that running a mono-steel team for this section works better than anything else because the tournament has a lot of special-type attackers that steel resists well. Gholdengo, Orthworm, and Koraidon if you have it give you enough coverage to plow through without much trouble.

The whole thing takes about twelve to fourteen hours if you know what you are doing and don't die to bad RNG. The main bottleneck is the late-game wild encounters that require specific conditions, and the Champion's Cup section where the AI plays a little optimally compared to the gym leaders. If you plan your team around coverage moves rather than raw stats, you cut the time significantly.