I love how this series progressed from 'escaping situations you might get into if you were especially careless' to 'psychotic weeks-long ordeals to escape a situation you could only put yourself in if you were a masochist'

"Hello Brendan.  Before you is a Pokeball.  Inside that ball, is a shiny Bagon with no attacking moves.  You can choose to evolve the Bagon into Salamence using only struggle, or you can trade it for a Horsea to surf away, giving up the shiny forever.  Make your choice."

I love how this series is set up like a tutorial, as if anyone ever on earth would ever at any time ever do this.

The ending was great. “Will you help Bagon reach its dreams or just give it away?” Brutal lol

In Gen 3, you have a 50% chance of gaining 1 point of friendship for every 128 steps taken, so you could get the Return TM without ever casting your rod. Still an extremely tedious escape, but at least you never have to burn PP for struggle.

Imagine if there's a site where you can download save files containing these softlocks, where you have to solve this kind of "escape".
It could easily become a speedrun category too

This series has this amazing ability of convincing me to watch all the older videos after a new one comes out, every single time

If you wanted to make this even more evil, you could skip Winona. She's the only gym leader you can skip AND her badge let you use fly outside of battle; now imagine doing all that just to realize you can't actually escape with fly and that you HAVE to trade the shiny.

I love how you always make it extra cruel by making it possible to escape in a super annoying and time consuming way.

And also a shiny Pokémon to make it hurt a bit extra to lose the save file

I thought the Bagon was only shiny because the shiny animation would take even more time, but it's also to make the easier escape painful. Damn…Pikasprey, you really are impressively sadistic. XD

Who needs creepypastas when Pikasprey can curse games this effectively?

These videos always take forever to come out cause Pikasprey actually picks himself out of every lock. He has 3 two year long locks running in the background.

By this point, I think trading away the Bagon and grinding another shiny Bagon would legit be faster than grinding Bagon until it becomes Salamence.

Salamence is my favorite, so yeah I’d definitely subject myself to this torture.

Another thing to mention is that once you get damaging moves for Bagon, at that point you’ll probably want to pivot towards targeting Tentacool for extra experience, but Tentacool is not a very common spawn from the Old Rod. It’s poetic, really. When you need to avoid them, they’ll ruin you. When you want to find them, they’ll make it difficult for you. There is no winning with the damn jellyfish.

What I like about these soft locks is that the glimmer of hope actually makes them even darker. Like if you had no choice but to restart, you would just do that. Having a chance of escape, no matter how scant, can make a dedicated player just try to do it. Especially where shinies are involved. The in-game trade for a Pokémon that can save you, but requires you to give up your shiny, is a nice touch that I always appreciate seeing in your traps.

10:33 That line really got me. Despite the Bagon being just 1s and 0s, mere lines of text in the game gave it a personality and heart of its own

The fact that he uses shiny Pokémon for the soft locks is even more evil and I love it.

For the return TM, you could also just have a cartridge where the battery has run dry so the only copy of the TM you could get is the one you are collected and tossed. That makes that loophole impossible

I feel like this Bagon would be the MC of an anime where all it does is fight a seemingly endless army of Karp. Once he evolves the MC Trainer becomes that cliche' OP steamroller who shows up near the end with Salamence. Final Boss: Gyrados

The ending at 10:25 makes me want to actually try this.  It would be so satisfying to finally escape.  Now if I could only find the time to shiny hunt a Bagon...