What is the most difficult item to obtain in any Pokémon game?

[Ashenlock]

I got to thinking this because I never completed the Battle Frontier of Emerald, and I remember thinking that the Starf Berry is supposedly only available in that generation by full completion of all seven facilities --- it seems the most difficult item to get there. But I don't know for sure whether or not that's true of Gen 3, much less of other generations or individual games among generations.

So, what do you think is the most difficult item or are the most difficult items to obtain? Feel free to be more specific or have multiple answers if it isn't as simple as having one categorical answer. (For instance, saying "[item] is the most difficult item to get in Gen 4 because of [reasons], but in Gen 6 it could be said that [different item] is harder to get because of [different reasons].") This goes for anything that could be called an item, including key items and medals in B2W2 like the Top Medalist medal.

It goes without saying that it does not count if you can use outside devices to generate the item in question effortlessly.

 

[Samirsin]

I would say the Liechi Berry on Gen III due to its appearance in Mirage Island only. Only one berry appears if the island appears, which is 1/65536 chances. Pretty rare.

 

[R_N]

Well, let's see....and I'm going to ignore event giveaways and unreleased items and such.

Gen 1 I don't think really has one. I guess by definition it'd have to be, like, "the other fossil"? You can, iirc, use Pokemon Stadium's PC storage to effectively trade items between 2 games and most people probably actually use the fossil to get the Pokemon within. With every other item, you could just obtain everything. With a map and some patience you can just find everything or grind out the cash for it in the game corner. But the fossils are otherwise one or the other while still technically being possible to obtain.

Gen 2 it has to be the various Mystery Gift decoration items. And I'm not talking about the 5 that through oversights no one can get. So in particular I suppose it'd be a tie between Big Lapras and Surfing Pikachu Doll. I put these above things like "trade exclusive items" -like the Brick or Light Ball- because those are effectively guaranteed you just need the set up to get them. The 2 dolls are a 0.4% chance and based on Trainer ID of the person you're trading with and you can only do it once per trainer per day and only up to 5 per day. Even with the Lucky Egg you could at least just grind out Chanseys all day long if you wanted.

Gen 3's Starf Berry is a good catch -literally only obtainable in Emerald and only for Golding the entire battle frontier- but I'd point more towards the Liechi Berry. You can do Star Berry with some elbow grease. Liechi Berry is exclusive to the Mirage Island and that's for most intents & purposes, just RNG. I assume you can rig the RNG to get it to show up, but I'd still say in practice it's the rarer of the two options and the one most out of the player's hands.

I'd point out that starting with Gen 3 you also kind of have to start making more distinction on if we're looking the gen as a whole or in the context of a specific game. So with that in mind Leichi is the most difficult to obtain in RS. I'm not sure what FRLG's most difficult to obtain would be, really; you'd have to sift out all the stuff that only obtainable in RS(E) but you can trade over anyway.

Gen 4-on I'd need to really dig into it. There's a ton of items, ways to get them, some exclusive to various avenues within specific games...

 

[QuentinQuonce]

Gen 2 it has to be the various Mystery Gift decoration items. And I'm not talking about the 5 that through oversights no one can get. So in particular I suppose it'd be a tie between Big Lapras and Surfing Pikachu Doll. I put these above things like "trade exclusive items" -like the Brick or Light Ball- because those are effectively guaranteed you just need the set up to get them. The 2 dolls are a 0.4% chance and based on Trainer ID of the person you're trading with and you can only do it once per trainer per day and only up to 5 per day. Even with the Lucky Egg you could at least just grind out Chanseys all day long if you wanted.

I'm a few drinks down atm but I recall reading that in Gen II there are a couple of decorations that are literally impossible to get - the combination of numbers is downright impossible to generate iirc. I think it's the Tentacool doll but I may have to validate this at a later date

Liechi Berry is, agreed, vastly unlikely to ever obtain in Gen III - the Lucky Egg is monstrously hard to obtain in Gen II, being only a 2% chance on a Pokemon with a 5% chance of appearing. I mean yeah you can grind out Chanseys but realistically you're facing a timesink of many hours if not days or weeks.

RSE have a load of decorations which only are obtainable based on your ID number IIRC, like the Tire - if you draw the wrong number, the only way is to swap with someone who has one already.

There's a bunch of berries in FRLG with a 1% Pickup rate, which, as R_N pointed out, make them massively rare in those games but less so in Gen III as a whole. If we're counting the E-Reader berries in RSE, they're certainly a pain to obtain now too.

 

[R_N]

I'm a few drinks down atm but I recall reading that in Gen II there are a couple of decorations that are literally impossible to get - the combination of numbers is downright impossible to generate iirc. I think it's the Tentacool doll but I may have to validate this at a later date

yes those are one of the 5 I mention as being unobtainable thanks to oversights. Unown Doll (GSC), Tentacool Doll (Stadium 2), Pikachu Bed (Stadium 2) and then 2 of them were mails (Blue Sky & Mirage; GSC)

There's a bunch of berries in FRLG with a 1% Pickup rate, which, as R_N pointed out, make them massively rare in those games but less so in Gen III as a whole. If we're counting the E-Reader berries in RSE, they're certainly a pain to obtain now too.

I did think about including the e-readers in this but ultimately put them in the "giveaway" type bin. It's also kind of awkward since you can only ever have one of the berries at a time anyway.
But I suppose if I did include them, then it would be a 6-way tie between the Series 2 Berries which were released exclusively in Japan. I can't imagine Series 2 saw as long a run as Series 1 did, and you got the language barrier going on in addition to the general difficulties of imports and such....

Oh but you know, double checking the berries in Series 2...If we disallow direct giveaways (a giveaway Darkrai held it) but find e-readers valid I think you can make a solid argument for the Enigma Berry in Gen 4. In Gen 3 it doesn't count for this discussion, it's not a "real" berry you can actually obtain it's just the placeholder berry for the e-reader berries. But if you send someone holding an e-reader berry through Pal Park, it turns into an Enigma Berry! It's the only way to obtain it other than through Battle Revolution which requires beating the 8th set of Master Battles in Stargazer Colosseum and then buying it. And iirc, PBR can only send to DP and can inexplicably only send it to one game at a time.
HGSS missed the Darkrai event, can't connect to PBR and thus the only way to obtain the Enigma Berry is through trading or... the Pal Park method!

 

[Volt-Ikazuchi]

And iirc, PBR can only send to DP and can inexplicably only send it to one game at a time.

That doesn't sound right... I never connected a DP game to PBR. Only Plat and Soul Silver.

Yep, nothing about that in Bulbapedia.

Starf Berry also sounds positively demonic to get in that game. Beat 100 opponents in Survival Battle, which just so happens to be all of them, and that's in the Courtyard Colosseum, which is also known for everyone's favorite field effect. Fog.

I'll take the Masters set, thanks.

 

[R_N]

That doesn't sound right... I never connected a DP game to PBR. Only Plat and Soul Silver.

View attachment 649720

Yep, nothing about that in Bulbapedia.

Starf Berry also sounds positively demonic to get in that game. Beat 100 opponents in Survival Battle, which just so happens to be all of them, and that's in the Courtyard Colosseum, which is also known for everyone's favorite field effect. Fog.

I'll take the Masters set, thanks.

Ah good catch. Maybe I was thinking of Ranch (DID get Platinum compatibility but only in Japan; HGSS left out cold)


...really would have preferred to misremember the "can only send one copy to one save file" thing though. What a stupid, stupid game.

 

[Ashenlock]

That doesn't sound right... I never connected a DP game to PBR. Only Plat and Soul Silver.

View attachment 649720

Yep, nothing about that in Bulbapedia.

Starf Berry also sounds positively demonic to get in that game. Beat 100 opponents in Survival Battle, which just so happens to be all of them, and that's in the Courtyard Colosseum, which is also known for everyone's favorite field effect. Fog.

I'll take the Masters set, thanks.

I remember being afraid of it before I tried it, but the 100 Survival Battle challenge didn't strike me as actually being very difficult. It wasn't nearly as frustrating as 100 consecutive wins in the Gen 4 Battle Tower.

I did find several of the Stargazer Colosseum post-game matches challenging, and I also found them rather clever and well-put-together. There haven't been any other NPC battles that I found so rewarding, although I never tried the Pokémon XD post-game NPC battles.

Regarding the Liechi Berry in R/S, I had totally forgotten that it was only in Mirage Island, and I had thought Mirage Island had a ~1/8192 chance of appearing each day rather than 1/65536. That certainly does make it more difficult to obtain than the Starf Berry, although the Starf Berry becomes significantly harder to obtain if you break your Emerald cart in a fit of rage.

 

[SadisticMystic]

Lucky Punch in B2W2?

There are no wild Chanseys anywhere in the game, just a one-time Happiny egg gift near the daycare. Still, they felt compelled to include the item, for some sense of "include," to appease those people who want to use Chansey for critical strats for some reason, rather than stall strats.

Is it as simple as "evolve your Happiny into a Chansey then show it to an NPC somewhere", as you might expect for Pokemon-specific items in later games? Ha, not even close. They make you play Funfest Missions for it.

Funfest Missions themselves aren't hard to access: just go to the Entralink and talk to the tree. But each mission is divided into level-1, 2, and 3 difficulty levels (plus a secret level 4, which doesn't count toward your process, which you can play using a button code for a bigger challenge). Normally the target goes up by 50-100% with each level, like with the most basic missions at the top of the list: Collect Berries has its level 1, 2, and 3 requirements at 3-6-12, Find Lost Items is 10-15-20, Find Lost Boys is 4-8-16...

Getting Lucky Punch, however, requires you to play Rock-Paper-Scissors Competition, in which you run around looking for RPS opponents and get a point for each one you defeat, after which they disappear and you have to go find another one. There's no penalty for losses or ties other than the time wasted in speaking to them again, but you only get 3 minutes with no way to extend that time, and when it's over, it's over. Level 1 requires 5 points, and level 2 requires 10--fair enough, and about what an average run will get you. However, the requirement for level 3 jumps all the way to 50 points.

And yet...it's even worse than that. In order to get the Lucky Punch, not only do you have to play on level 3, you also have to unlock the "Double Score Bonus" by dragging the total all the way out to 100 points, which would be enough to beat level 4. Clearly not possible, except by what Funfest Missions were designed for in the first place: multiplayer play! Like Alola's Festival Plaza missions, you can team up with other players and total your scores together; unlike in Alola, there was never a server that would let you team up with randoms online. Instead, you need at least 9-10 players working in concert, each with their own console and BW2 game, gathered together in the same place to use local wireless. Just to get this one item, though you at least get five copies of it so you can put together almost a full team of critical-happy Chanseys. You know, if that's what you wanted to do, badly enough to be willing to go through all that just for the Lucky Punch.

(In fact, if you want it that much, you might as well get one from BW1 instead: there you can talk to a guy north of Undella Town who digs up treasure on the beach, and gives you a random item once per day. This item has a 1-in-27 chance of being Lucky Punch: not great, but still less tedious than the alternative. Unlike 3->4 transfer, the 4->5 method forcefully removes all held items, so you can't use that to smuggle them in either.)

 

[QuentinQuonce]

Lucky Punch in B2W2?

There are no wild Chanseys anywhere in the game, just a one-time Happiny egg gift near the daycare. Still, they felt compelled to include the item, for some sense of "include," to appease those people who want to use Chansey for critical strats for some reason, rather than stall strats.

Well, they include items all the time that aren't directly obtainable in one game but can be traded in from another - it's just keeping the code consistent. You can transfer a Pokemon holding a Shoal Shell up to Gen IV or trade it to the Gamecube titles, there's just no reason to do beyond novelty as it has no use in those games.

Really I think with this example (and others of the same sort) the question is whether items that are outright unobtainable count. As another example, the Pokedoll is impossible to natively obtain in RSE, but obviously trivial to obtain in FRLG - the Fluffy Tail serves the same purpose in Hoenn.

 

[bdt2002]

I wouldn’t say it’s as rare or hard to obtain as some of the other stuff already described in this thread, but I feel like the Jade Orb in HeartGold & SoulSilver deserves a mention here. To get access to this item (and by extension Rayquaza), you need to have all 16 badges, have defeated Red at least once, collected the Blue Orb or Red Orb, caught Kyogre or Groudon in the Embedded Tower, and have someone trade the Legendary that is not in your version to you. The catch is, both Kyogre and Groudon have to have the Embedded Tower as their met location for this to work, giving it a step over other similar Legendary encounters. Not just any Kyogre and Groudon would work.

Nah but for real we all know the real answer is “anything that’s not a Hard Stone” from that one Join Avenue shop-

 

[R_N]

Was looking through Gen 5's items to see if I could spot one more obnoxious than the Lucky Punch.
I think LP still has it beat but I do want to throw in as a contender: The "Confusion" berries; the ones that heal you a lot if you match your nature but confuse you otherwise.

The only way to get these in Gen 5 are either the Dream World (now defunct) or, of all things, Spin Trade. Did you remember this was a feature, because I sure didn't.
It's a local trade feature in Gen 4 (you can get these berries elsewhere in all Gen 4 games, though) & 5 where 2-5 players can offer an egg and they will be randomly distributed between the group's members. If the egg "lands" on a bonus space, the person that got that egg will also get a berry which is the only way to obtain these specific berries and also only if you are playing in a group of 2-3 players.

Related but in the context of BW1 specifically (BW2 added a few other options), the EV reducing berries? Also only available through Dream World & Spin Trade and only if you had a full 5 players.

Like for both these things, obviously the DW was in full swing at the time but these days I would easily put them at #2 or 3 in our rankings.

And it's out of the running because of this but bizarre shoutout to the Wepear & Pinap Berries which between BW1 & 2 was only ever available in the Dream World. The other "sell" berries were available in either BW1 or 2 through other methods. So if you were someone who diligently wanted to collect every item after all this time, for some reason, my condolences.



Also for Gen 4's consideration: If we exclude PBR (for whatever reason) the Starf Berry is only available after getting 9,999,999 steps in the Pokewalker. Yeesh!