It seems that the Pokemon company is not a fan of nuzlocke

Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang, former Nintendo Minute hosts who previously worked for many years at Nintendo PR, provided insight into The Pokemon Company’s opinions on nuzlocke. Apparently, it is something that is viewed very negatively.

Ellis revealed during the last episode of the series Kate and Krista Podcast In an episode of Nintendo Minute, an idea was floated to try and run nuzlocke. Unfortunately, the proposal was immediately dropped.

Ellis said:

“Well we have a great story to tell about this where we thought this would be a fun idea for a Nintendo Minute video, so we showed it to The Pokemon Company and said, ‘Hey, we’d like to do a nuzlocke tour, what do you think?’ “That’s what we think” – Bam! So they said, “We consider this to be on the same level as using hacking” – ROM hacking.

Excuse me? This is just a game play style that everyone can buy – no hacking, you just play the game. This was really one of the more like, “Wait what?” responses.”

Yang added that “there have been a lot of creators who have played nuzlocke style in Pokemon that have been removed from their creator program.”

Nuzlocke Challenges have been around with the Pokemon series for a remarkably long time. These are the rules that players impose on themselves to increase the difficulty of the games. There is no hack or external change to the code.