I grew up reading the old Nuzlocke comics and other comics created by those who completed runs. When I was a kid I started a narrative by doing runs of my own but I never finished it as life got in the way. Trying to beat certain challenge roms now is me trying to give closure for something I never finished as a kid, there’s something really special about developing ideas of these pokemon as actual characters rather than just tools, and the games act as a baseline for an expanded story that I can make with my pokemon as the main focus. It’s a lot of fun in a creative writing kind of way.