The humble Wooloo, a rounded sheep-Pokémon, rolls around the Galar region in search of love and glory. One Wooloo, called Ares, found that with a 21-year-old college student and Pokémon player who goes by Celvx online — together, they beat Pokémon Sword and Shield and became the new Galar champions.
Yes, Celvx used a single Pokémon, the humble normal-type Wooloo, to take down eight gym leaders and Leon, the current former Galar region champion. “I choose Wooloo because it was available from the start of the game and had almost become a sort of psuedo-mascot for the game, with a lot of fan art for Sword and Shield featuring Wooloo,” Celvx told Polygon. “I chose Scorbunny [for my starter] and threw it in the PC boxes as soon as I could.”
Celvx posted about the feat on Reddit this week, showing off Ares’ final stats — level 100 with 217 HP — and moves. It’s there where he learned about unintentionally made the game even harder than it already was; Ares has a negative attack nature, which means attacks are decreased in exchange for a boost in other areas. But there were upsides to Ares: “I think in the end, not having extra vulnerabilities to fire is what allowed me to take down Leon’s Charizard.”
And so the lone sheep triumphs against all odds
#PokemonSwordShield #NintendoSwitch pic.twitter.com/454zKjW4Pr
— celvx (@celvx_) November 18, 2019
Celvx said the hardest battle was Raihan, since it was a double battle — to account for that, he had to add a Magikarp to his party and spam its useless Splash move. It took seven to eight attempts to beat him, since he was really taking two Pokémon with his lone Wooloo. Celvx leveled Wooloo to 90 and learned from the previous attempts about which Pokémon hit the hardest. The key? Lots of potions and finding and equipping Eviolite, which boosts defense and special defense for the Pokémon holder if it’s not evolved fully.
Overall, it took “at least 20 hours” split into “two main sessions of playing the game.”
He continued: “At one point I got tired of grinding raid battles for either Electro Ball or Wild Charge TRs and decided to just wait for the Watt salesmen to rotate their shops, and that was the gap of time inbetween the two sessions I played and beat in the game in.”
The duo is now a hero among Pokémon players and Wooloo fans everywhere. And Celvx has some tips for people looking to do a similar thing. For one, get a lot of potions — “half” of Ares’ moves had recoil, so it was taking a lot of damage alongside the opposite Pokémon’s attacks. Items like Guard Spec are important, too, to keep status changes, like nerfed attack, down.
“I can definitely say I had way more fun playing through the game this way than I would if I’d used a full team of six,” he said. “Get creative with it, push your boundaries, and most importantly, play the game in a way that’s fun to you!”