 Every gen 1er remembers that iconic battle in the indigo league which saw bellsprout go full ultra instinct and nearly knock ash out of the tournament. That was until ashes muck used some rather unorthodox methods to finally stop bellsprout in its tracks and ruin the dreams of so many of us bellsprout fans. I swear at the time I genuinely believed if muck hadn't beat bellsprout this thing would have went on to be the indigo champion. This was and still is one of my all time favourite moments in the original pokemon anime series and made me instantly fall in love with this shrub like pokemon. I'm not kidding when I say I was genuinely sad when bellsprout was smothered by muck. I mean it gave me a whole new love for muck as well as I wanted nothing more than to see ash win the league. But the setup for bellsprout was there and like many other epic anime arcs in this first series like the san tru guy, richie and the kids from the school of hard knocks. Bellsprout was brushed under the rug and never revisited until now. Can I, a multiple time pokemon world championship competitor prove that bellsprout is in fact strong enough to become a pokemon champion prove the anime and the naysayers wrong and show the kid that sat there over 20 years ago in front of a tv screen watching as my dreams were crushed that bellsprout has what it takes to become the very best. As pokemon were unwilling to commit to a new bellsprout anime series even after two decades of polite requests we only had one option with matters left in our own hands solo run. This was perfect we all know that only the strongest pokemon could single handedly beat an entire pokemon game. This was bellsprout's chance. Taking it right back to the beginning we would attempt a solo run of pokemon red and blue and if we could do it we would prove muck, ash and the pokemon company and all you bellsprout doubters out there that it was in fact as strong if not stronger than the anime showed it to be and this redemption arc wasn't going to be any solo run either. We were going to do this in the fastest time we could and with minimal battles. This means no going out of our way to battle trainers or wild pokemon we didn't have to so we wouldn't be over leveled and also no recovery items can be used during a battle i ignore potions or full heals etc. Now for the context bellsprout although in my eyes is a great pokemon in reality it is a stage one pokemon it has a base stat total of 270 and has ranked 117th out of the original 150 pokemon in pokemon's red and blue with 50 HP stat 75 attack 35 defense 40 speed and a special stat of 70 it doesn't have much to boast about. Its move pool isn't great either having only 9 level up moves and only able to learn 14 out of a possible 50 tms from the entire game. This made the challenge let's say a little more limiting than your usual run would be. So aside from some of these small constraints there was only one other obstacle i really feared going into this solo run and that was Koga the poison type gym leader of fuchsia city wielded the one opponent the ultimate nemesis of bellsprout and that was muck. Not only did we have a huge challenge in front of us to achieve a goal of becoming a very best we literally had to overcome bellsprout's greatest rival bellsprout wasn't going to let one purple mess ruin our road to glory. So with the sage set we went into our challenge we nicknamed our rival john head into the long grass outside of palatown and promptly get taken to professor ox lab where he introduces us to a level 5 starter pokemon bellsprout with fine whip and growth as our starter moves it surprisingly makes bellsprout somewhat manageable to deal with even with some of the more tougher opponents we'd face along the way. And yes there is the argument that i should have had my rival choose charmer under for a more challenging run but the fact is they would end up with an arcanine rather than the garrados in the final rival battle anyway along with blastoise's slightly better defensive stats it makes this a pretty trivial choice in my mind there is no argument it definitely makes the early rival battles a little easier but with a task at hand i'm willing to bend a little on this choice for us to begin the game. Anyway with our rival match not lasting more than two turns of vine whip we make a way to pick up ox parcel get a pokedex and a town map from our rival sister before taking on our first big challenge of the run against bug trainer with a level 9 weedle in viridian forest. We do level up a little with a couple of wild pokemon encounters before taking on this trainer as i feel this is important for the run which we will get into in a moment but with vine whip as our only attacking move we have to lean quite heavily on growth to boost a special attack before we are able to do enough damage and take the weedle down. As you'll soon come to see one of the issues we face a lot of the time with bellstrout in the early game is the low pp we have access to especially against a lot of type-resistant opponents we face. Next up is brock which bell spirit makes as you can imagine easy work of using its super effective vine whip attack earning our boulder badge we then move on to route three to take on our first bug catcher while using a combination of growth and vine whip to go through the different bug types they've got access to and this takes us to level 13 where we learn one of the most important moves of the game for bellsprout in rap. Now in generation one rap is a little broken as once used it prevents the opponent from attacking until the move is finished and rap can last between two to five turns it also has an added bonus that if the first hit is a critical hit then every subsequent turn after this will be a critical hit as well it does have a pretty shaky accuracy in 90% which we learned about many times in this run but anyway with rap at our disposal we are now able to better deal with the flying and bug threats that resist our grass type vine whip move which allows us to moor through the next set of opponents on route three before making our way to mount moon where we catch a paris to be our future harem and dig slave before arriving at cerulean city. Before taking on our arrival we head straight to the gym to take on the gym trainers to get a little more experience before taking on our rival which wasn't going to be easy. John our rival wielded a level 18 pigiotto which pulls a serious threat to our run firstly add out sped us and alongside it threatened with super effective flying type attacks as well as annoying moves like sand attack which lowered our accuracy we would need a little bit of luck going into this one so turn one we take a gust attack and go for a wrap but that misses not ideal we then eat a critical hit quick attack so we have probably one of the worst starts to this battle now on 25 hp at this point we go for another wrap which actually hits this time we then take a sand attack and luckily hit another wrap which ends up hitting four times to finally remove the pigiotto from the field next comes in abra which can only teleport so we use this time to set up our growths before thankfully landing in vine whip it lands a critical hit which actually means that a special boost from growth or ignored this turn we miss our next vine whip before another one lands and is able to take abra down rats attack comes in and I'm so worried that if our vine whip misses here a combination of tackling quick attack are probably enough to lose us this battle but we outspeed and vine whip hits leaving only square left to deal with our first vine misses and we eat a tackle but bellsprout pulls through and our next one picks up the knockout to beat our rival on our first attempt after such a shaky start we eventually are able to move on successfully before heading up nugget bridge we take on misty and make easy work of a two water type pokemon to earn our second gym badge before waking our way through nugget bridge and rescuing bill to get our ticket for the ssan now with our ssan ticket we board the ship and take on our next rival fight this one isn't as tough as our last one with our level increasing now we outspeed the level 19 pigiotto and land a wrap before it's able to even move which sets up a cleanish sweep of the team after it falls we get hm cut and move on to vermilion city gym we manage to crack the trash can code which never makes sense to me and take on lieutenant surge which bellsprout at this stage is level 31 and with our grass type resist electric type attacks we make a pretty clean sweep of this gym by button mash and vine whip a bunch of times earning our third gym badge we blindly make our way through the rock tunnel without many issues next arriving at lavender town before heading to celadon city to take on our first real encounter with team rocket we pick up tm 10 in the underground of the game corner before taking on giovanni which honestly even if we weren't as high a level would be a pretty easy match even if his kangaskhan didn't cause too many problems like it sometimes can now with the self scope acquired we decided to take on erica at celadon city gym it's a pretty easy match although we don't have many ways to hit her pokemon for super effective damage combination of rap and sleep powder in this match really carries us through pretty easily and earns us a fourth gym badge putting us right around the halfway mark next we make our way to the pokemon tower and have a more tougher challenge taking on our rival again i say tougher challenge as we're doing this at a way higher level the match isn't exactly too bad we outspeed the pidgeot which means we can use rap before it's able to land attacks or just rub with sand attack then comes in growlith knowing our rival has a cadaver which could cause us some issues we decide to sleep powder the growlith to get some growths off to better deal with the psychic threat on the horizon we land our sleep powder but only get two growths off before growlith wakes up then this leads to us missing three sleep powders in a row whilst getting burned from the incoming ember before it falls asleep once again using the sleep turns we manage to get up another three growths but sit around 54 hp as our onslaught begins thankfully our razor leaf doesn't land a critical hit here and picks up the knockout on growlith execute comes in next and we go for a wrap before our second one misses taking us down to 34 hp after a barrage hit from our opponent we land our next wrap which hits four times and looks like max damage to pick up the knockout leaving us on a near 16 hp before cadaver hits the field we go for a wrap and miss but cadaver throws up hail mary and goes for a teleport we go for another wrap and again it hits this time taking it down with two hits leaving us with four hp as war total comes in as our rival's final pokemon we outspeed and thankfully hit our razor leaf to pick up the knockout and oh boy four hp left did we get lucky here but we take those the burn made it closer than it probably should have been and we had multiple wrap misses along with this so if anything it just shows how well bellsprout performed even under these crazy circumstances so moving on we clear the tower get the poker flute from mr fuji and then make our way to self-court in saffron city to take on giovanni but only after taking on john and rival one more time this is probably one of the hardest rival battles in the game and i'm super worried as now with pidgeot at level 37 we no longer outspeed before we go into this match i teach bellsprout mega drain that we've acquired from beating erika as well as finally overriding rap with double edge that we picked up earlier on in our game we go into this match at level 44 turn one we take a wing attack and get lucky as our first sleep powder hits we get two growth off before it wakes up and lands a second wing attack taking us down to 45 hp there's another sleep powder put it back to sleep so thankfully that one did hit we get a third growth off but it instantly wakes up and we take yet another wing attack and get lucky once again with a sleep powder hitting putting the bird back to sleep and leaving us on 15 hp things are not looking super great at this point we managed to get another two growths off and then go from mega drain to recover some health we mega drain again just missing the knockout is pidgeot finally wakes up and now sitting on 63 hp managed to take the incoming wing attack to finish it off with mega drain the badge boost definitely helped us take that last wing attack a lot better here and just sidestepping here for those of you that don't know throughout gen one anytime you earn a new badge you get a 12.5 boost in the stat that that badge is associated with but it doesn't stop there there is a glitch in the game so anytime you have a stat altered like with growth these boosts are reapplied meaning you are getting multiple boosts anytime you have a stat altered so for this instance as the thunder badge gives us a 12.5 percent boost in defense every time we use growth that defense boost has been reapplied so explaining why we took less damage here from that final wing attack these additional badge boosts are lost if you level up in battle so it can be tricky if you are relying on them in some matches when this happens but being aware of this glitch definitely helps out a lot now back to the battle with pidgeot down next comes in growlith which we mega drain twice for the ko john then sends in execute we hit our sleep powder to get the sixth growth off and then finally hit another sleep powder before using a combination of mega drain and double edge to take it down alcazam comes in next and a no confusion critical hit means we were able to land a double edge for a clean ko leaving only his blast hose which falls with our final mega drain we had done it on our first try and i was so happy that this one match was done we then make a quick visit to heal at the pokemon center then return to take on javani for our next challenge this match honestly is a breeze as we sleep powder then in dorino growth up a bunch and then sweep through the entire team with ease so it's a pretty common trend at this at this stage we're using that sleep powder growth combination just to sweep through a lot of our opponents now we head to fuchsia city and grab some gold teeth and hm surf in the safari zone before taking on the fuchsia city jim koga the gym leader and bell sprouts biggest nemesis to date in our rematch with mac we enter the gym beat the two mandatory trainers on the route to koga and go into battle he leads off with coughing and rather than go for a sleep powder i straight off the bat start getting growths off i managed to get a maximum of six growths set up through a barrage of sludge and poison gas attacks then mega drain for the knockout whilst recovering some health as we take the coffin down we level up to 49 and lose all our badge boosts just when muck hits the field so not exactly the greatest timing we hit mega drain and it does over 50 percent as muck goes for a useless poison gas attack we were now about to overcome our first and biggest obstacle in this challenge no more will bell sprout be haunted by that muck incident from 20 years ago in the anime we hit mega drain but it crits so we miss the knockout as we take a sludge bomb which lands a huge critical hit taking us all the way down to 36 hp oh my god literally what's this happening again the rng gods were all against us but we click one more mega drain and muck is finally down that was way too close for comfort next coughing comes in as we mega drain twice to pick up the knockout and only wheezing is standing between us and victory i really am praying we don't see yourself destruct as i think from the current health level we will be knocked out we mega drain it toxics and sets us up for our next victory with two more mega drains we managed to knock out the wheezing avoid any self destruct and earn our fifth gym badge as we finally overthrow muck at the same time one step of redemption was made now with one challenge done our next one is just about to happen as we head back to saffron city to take on the psychic gym leader sabrina sabrina was always a scary proposition coming into this challenge with this strong psychic type attacks that were super effective against bell sprout i always felt that this would be probably the hardest battle of the entire run and it wasn't wrong our first attempt ended up super badly after we got knocked out by a psychic critical hit and it wasn't until our third attempt when we were able to take a psychic and get a sleep powder which allowed us enough time to get five growths off meaning we were in a much better position to start our in-game sweep mega drain barely missed the knockout on cadavera but put our hp back to a more respectable 73 hp level next we see sabrina use a hyperperson as we go for another mega drain giving us more recovery before a final mega drain removes the cadavera from the field next comes in mr mine which drops to a single attack venomoth then comes in as we hit a sleep powder and take it down with a single double edge alakazam comes in and is finished off with two mega drains and in hindsight i should have probably just double edged here as a psychic critical hit would have definitely taken us down and in the heat of the battle i just clicked mega drain thinking recovery was a better plan you know and having those six growths behind us i thought we were safe but you know you've always got to consider those critical hits especially in gen one when they are a bit more prominent coming out onto you but really gone like looking at it we've we've earned our sixth gym badge and we've finally beat sabrina so we can move on next up was blaine we used the same theme as we had been doing most of this endgame put the first pokemon to sleep growth up and then sweep through with a combination of mega drain and double edge this match was pretty straightforward and our seventh badge before we moved on to viridian city to take on giovanni one final time now again a little bit like blaine the giovanni match was pretty easy for us at this stage as well having a bunch of ground type pokemon that again couldn't deal with the growth boosted bell sprout one little bit helped us earn our eighth gym badge and we only had six more battles left before we able to complete our challenge and crown bell sprout potentially a pokemon champion next we had yet another rival battle against john who was even stronger before we made our way onto victory rod leading with a level 47 pidgeot this time it's still outspread a tiny level 53 weed and got a wing attack off before we once again were able to put it to sleep with sleep powder as pidgeots today sleep for five turns we managed to get five growths off then go for a mega drain to recover some of our health and then finish it off with one more mega drain right horn is next victim to come in before ground comes in and takes the drop to a mega drain and a double edge combination execute enters the field after this and because of the threat it poses with hypnosis i decide to sleep powder it before it is able to inflict the same status on us we hit and manage to remove it with two double edges before it wakes up again we take a little risk against algazam when it hits the field and go for two mega drains to knock it out but thankfully neither of its two psychic attacks land a critical hit before blastoise comes in and goes down once again to a single mega drain giving us a clean first time victory against our rival john once again before we head into victory road we decide to head around the kanto region to pick up some aether and max elixir items which we would need between elite four members and this definitely slows our progress down here but without these items i don't think we would be able to complete our challenge with the low hp attacks that we rely on with bellsprout after picking up what we needed we make our way to victory road and arrive at the indigo league now our biggest test is about to start the elite four can we make this final step with bellsprout and complete this redemption arc once and for all our first test is lower lie our bellsprout going into this match is at level 56 and although lower lie isn't the toughest of all elite four members i still need to respect her her ice types can pose a bit of a threat to our grass type bellsprout and without a little bit of luck especially as we weren't super over level going into this fight it could be a bit of a tripwire turn one we go straight for a sleep powder and hit now dugon just has to stay asleep long enough for us to get our growths off we managed to get four growths up before it wakes up which is honestly pretty nice we go for another sleep powder and hit giving us the room to get our final two growths off and maxing out our special attack stat this along with our badge boost puts us in a great position to now sweep through the remainder of our team dugon cloister and slobber all go down to a single mega drain before jinx hits the field as jinx is such good special attack i know that even boosted it won't go down in one hit to a mega drain and always threatenings are freeze on us with its ice type attacks we mega drain as it ice punches and yes no freeze this time leaving only lapras to deal with after the jinx goes down to another mega drain now lapras is a little like jinx in fact that it won't go down to a single mega drain and as it barely holds on lapras launches a blizzard which doesn't freeze us or create us meaning we are able to be lower alive pretty easily and on our first attempt allowing us to move on next we have bruno and honestly out of all the elite four members i don't think anyone ever worries about bruno all he's doing is stealing pp at this point i i do joke about this and make fun of him but i do feel sorry for brino hopefully one day he gets his own redemption arc in these games just like bellsprout is doing right now maybe that would make a good video when we do like a bruno run or something i don't know let me know down below i have what you think about that anyway bruno is pretty easy like i say once we set up the growth we can sweep through everything pretty easily there's only the match up that takes a couple of hits at the end before we take our victory and are able to move on now the next trainer is agathan this one is a little bit more difficult and probably one of the more trickiest out of all the elite four members with a speedy ghost types we don't have anywhere to deal super effective damage either double edge is useless and we have to navigate around confusion as well as sleep whilst worrying about the stray hairs from gallback which can undo all of our growth boosts in one fell swoop our best bet against agatha is getting lucky with landing a sleep powder on turn one and then getting max sleep turns to get those growth boosts set up whilst hopefully stacking the badge boost to add speed the haunter and the gengar in the late game to slowly eke out the win turn one we see a gengar at speed at bell sprout and go for a dream eater which fails as always as we land a sleep powder we manage to get three growths off before gengar wakes up now even though we have three growths and are stacking our badge boosts at the same time we are still at this stage slower than gengar so need to a little bit more luck to get all six growths up before we can start attacking for context we hit for such a lot of damage even with a max that special attack we can't afford to attack into the gengar or the haunter before maxing out our damage the next turn gengar goes for a confusory and hits this is really bad and i know if we don't get the the rolls here it could end our run and we end up hitting ourselves in confusion next turn it goes for a dream eater which is good for us while we manage to hit through the confusion this time and land a sleep powder so really fortunate turn for us here we go for a growth but hit ourselves in confusion once again this is on sleep playing out like i feared it would we try and go for a growth the next turn and finally snap out of confusion to land a fourth growth gengar stays asleep which is huge and now we are out speeding it with a badge boost stacking alongside a growth boosts gengar stays asleep another turn as we get our final sixth growth off we manage to get two mega drains off before gengar wakes up and then goes straight for another sleep powder which luckily makes direct hit again we mega drain two more times and agatha's first gengar is down next gold bad comes in as i'm worried about the potential haes coming out from it here and risk losing all of our kind of growth boosts to go for the sleep powder it hits and gold bad falls asleep allowing me to deal with it pretty quickly with two double edge attacks haunter's up next and our bell sprout has now hit its best form landing another sleep powder straight off the bat before taking it down with three mega drains our bulk hits a field next we land yet another sleep powder and it goes down to two double edge attacks agatha then sends in her final pokemon gengar and go for a sleep powder again put ourselves in a great position to close this one out and we land a mega drain but then forced to use an elixir as we run out of mega drains and hindsight we needed this over the next few turns agatha uses two super potions to heal her gengar meaning we need an additional five mega drains to finally take it down and move one step closer to becoming the champion with agatha done that means lanters up next and here we had a couple of problems first one was our moves were really low pp and we only had one sleep powder left currently and with our remaining elixir i wanted to kind of keep this before we took on our arrival for the final battle so we need to be very smart about our move choices in this match and pretty lucky at the same time as well the next issue was we were very close to actually leveling up so if we wanted to utilize our badge boosts alongside any subsequent growth boosts that we would normally use then we'd need to set them up after defeating the garrados so they won't reset alongside that level up that we gain after beating the garrados and why is this important well if we lost these it makes the aerodactyl match a lot harder so in order to have a better chance against it we need to utilize the additional badge boosts we have access to after defeating the garrados so we don't lose them when we have that level up with all this in mind we go on to the battle turn one garrados uses lia thankfully not hyper beam we try to put the garrados to sleep but we miss our only sleep powder we have access to next we try and get some damage off with mega drain as garrados goes for a dragon rage next it goes for another layer as we double edge and the interesting thing here is that these layers although they're lowering our defense are actually stacking and activating our badge boosts meaning the next time we actually add speed to pick up the knockout on garrados before it is able to move now after leveling up on the garrados dragon air hits the field all we need to worry about here is a potential hyper beam it goes for an agility so that's good as we start going for the growths we managed to just get six growths off straight away against the dragon air as it keeps on clicking agility now we have set ourselves up to deal with everything left on lances team we just need to avoid any potential critical hits next we go for a mega drain to recover some health and the next one takes down the first dragon air at full health the next dragon air hits the field and rather than wait until after the match we use a final elixir to restore bell sprouts pp currently next we use double edge for a clean one hit kill and then sleep powder the aerodactyl which comes in and we outspeed thanks to our badge boosts two mega drains and a hyper portion and one double edge later and the aerodactyl drops leaving lance with his dragonite as his last pokemon for us to defeat we land a sleep powder and hit two double edges as a dragonite barely hangs on to wake up just to get off a barrier before it goes down to one final double edge and with that we move on to our final battle of this challenge one step closer away to becoming champion with bell sprout only john stood in our way now bell sprout was level 60 at this point going to this last match and we were six hours and 44 minutes on the clock and all i'm thinking about now is can we do this last final rival battle on our first attempt my big concern about this match was firstly john's pigard as it will outspeed us and can threaten with big damage critical hit and it could halt us instantly in our tracks especially if our sleep powders aren't on point secondly if we aren't able to set about growth at this stage before the alakazam comes in then we could easily get swept by it it's strong psychic type attack and it's crits that it could potentially hit us with so it could go downhill pretty quickly now we go into this match turn one pigard goes for mirror move which is great it fails obviously as we sleep powder and it hits so bell sprout on form straight away next we manage to get off four growths before pidgeot wakes up and with our badge boost behind us we now add speeder and get lucky landing our second sleep powder we get our final two growths off while pidgeot stays asleep as we go for two double edge attacks to take it down next comes in alakazam and again looking back i should have just double edged here but being probably a little more nervous i go for the sleep powder when it's not really needed if we miss the sleep powder that would open us up to a whole bunch of rng that could finish our run right now thankfully though with the luck on our side we hit the zam takes a nap and then we mega drain and double edge for the knockout ride on comes in next and goes down to a single mega drain and then arcanine comes in we hit a sleep powder onto it yes we're nearly there it stares asleep as we double edge in mega drain twice to take the fire dog down executive comes in next we sleep powder again and hit the bell sprout is on a mission eggy stares asleep while we double edge twice for another knockout and now we actually level up with blastos coming in next we lose all of our badge boosts are literally the worst time because blastos has blizzard and if it crits us it will take us down and blastos will move first here we go blastos going for the blizzard it misses it misses it misses here we go and we mega drain knockout and the bell sprout on our first try has become the pokemon champion as solo run is complete bell sprout has the redemption only after three restarts this entire run using no recovery items in battle we managed to do this under seven hours which for my second ever solo run attempt is pretty good ah i feel so happy we managed to do this and yet we got some luck along the way but i feel uh with a chance like this you definitely need a little bit of luck to help you along bell sprout is actually an incredible mod it's not got the best move pool or base stats but with the tools it has you can definitely do a job and do it super well and i can finally say it rose above all expectations to become a champion just like it showed the potential to do all those years ago and that anime during the indigar league i hope you enjoyed the solo run challenge if you have please drop a like on the video if we can hit 200 likes on this video i will do another one of these challenges very soon please leave a comment down below if you'd like to see me try the challenge with another pokemon that you'd like to see i love gen one so these challenges although super new to me are something i really love to do and would like to try it again sometime soon so thank you so much friends for tuning in i do feel like we could do this a lot faster but like i say this is one of my first attempts doing a solo run so i'm still kind of figuring out the best ways to go about completing the game and learning about what i need to do along the way and i'm sure as the more i do these solo runs the quicker i'll get and the more exciting they'll become the more challenging things i can add in to to complete them so thank you for taking the time to come by and support the channel take care and until next time see ya