We’ve been covering Twitch Plays Pokemon quite a bit on the site, mostly because I find it fascinating. There’s the social experiment aspect, the flood of creative memes, and the thrill of victory against the odds.

A few days ago, the stream managed to finally overcome the Elite Four and Champion Lance after nearly 40 attempts, slowly but surely grinding their way to victory. They finished beating that game, then moved on to Emerald and its OMNIPRESENT TRUMPETS.

Emerald has been a bit of a different adventure. Sure, some of the familiar anarchy/democracy bickering and PC fear and Elite Four grinding remains, but there have still been quite a few changes.

For one, the government mode started out as all anarchy, all the time. A few days in, that system expanded further into incorporating every single input. This meant it was difficult to evolve Pokemon at times (like the starter Torchic) because any B input was absolutely going to screw it up — before, it might get caught in a flood of spammed entries and not register properly. Eventually, a nearly identical system to Crystal was implemented. It’s the best of both worlds, really; anarchy reigns, but democracy can be voted in if enough people want it.

Our main character, a female this time named A, started off looking like a psycho killer. She seemed to love catching Poochyenas, or doges, and eventually gathered enough to make a full team. Then the run started hitting some bumps, and it forced A to start bonding with her team, especially a Marill named M4. Wattson’s electric gym proved to be tremendously tough to beat, and Zexy the Torchic was released along the way to everyone’s dismay.

The Safari Zone proved to be an adventure of its own. The stream caught almost 30 Oddishes, one of which ended up becoming a permanent part of the team as a Vileplume. But the bigger temptation was a Pikachu — even though our old pal Pika is pretty awful as far as stats go, some folks in the collective decided they wanted it, and released a better Minun to try to get it. Pikachu was labeled as a heretic and deposited shortly thereafter.

But none of that strife compared to the Elite Four. Previously, beating those trainers and then the champion has taken a couple dozen tries or so, but not this time. Poor A suffered through more than ONE HUNDRED attempts before finally breaking through, and it took a ton of leveling to get there. M4 hit level 100 early on in the grind, which meant that any experience going her way was a waste. The rest of the team was pitifully underleveled, and the team seemed fixed because everyone was scared of releasing more Pokemon at the PC.

But over time, others made their stand — a Hariyama who was caught on Victory Road with no good attacks, but became a powerhouse, a Tentacruel that was saddled with three water HMs and forgot Ice Beam but still carried its weight, a Mightyena that served as the doge representative, a Graveler that was strong until the stream deleted Earthquake and Rollout off its movelist.

In the end, five of the six team members survived for the battle against Wallace. Rollouts landed properly, everyone in the stream was on the same page, and a brutal Elite Four experience FINALLY came to an end. More than five days of work reached its fruition.

Next up is an experiment that might just revitalize the whole damn thing: randomized Pokemon Fire Red. If you’re not familiar with Pokemon randomizers, let’s just say that it’s an entertaining process. Instead of fixed starters, any three-chain evolution could be an option. Wild legendaries (scaled appropriately for level) are possible. TMs can be set to be any move, learnable by a random set of Pokemon.

Suffice to say that these changes on top of what is already a chaotic Twitch Plays Pokemon experience should be extremely entertaining. I played around with my own randomized ROM a bit to see what it was like, and it was a lot of fun. Wild level 2 Articuno on Route 3? Sure! Catch a Metagross for my team? Why not! Hell, I accidentally set off with an Igglybuff as my starter once, and it had zero attack moves. It’s a recipe for disaster.

I haven’t been watching the stream as much since the original run, but following the updates on Reddit and tuning in for the important stuff like champion battles is still a lot of fun. TPP continues to be more than we could have ever expected from an odd social experiment, and I’m on board for more.