Not sure if anyone's interested, but I'm going to be doing a No In-Battle Items playthrough of Pokemon Pearl for fun and I thought I'd document it in a thread! Simple little challenges like this can really change the game, and make casual playthroughs difficult even for veterans!

For clarification: held items are totally allowed! But anything you have to go into your bag to use (minus pokeballs) in a battle is totally prohibited. No potions, no X items, and no status healing! It's tougher than you might think!

To catch things up, I chose Piplup as my starter and just finished leveling up Piplup, Budew, and Starly in preparation for the first real challenge of the playthrough: the rival fight just outside of Jublife City.

Rival defeated! Not too many injuries to show for it either. Training up Starly to handle Turtwig even though I don't really want to use it was definitely a gamechanger though, and I'm going to have to work on really thinking about what Pokemon I bring in playing on Set style!

First gym battle done and, much like the rival fight, my preparation made it much smoother than initially expected! Clicked growth a couple times with Babybud and that was the whoooole game. Mega Drain HP gain was big though!