The Brave Wanderer: I made Claude play a Pokémon it never read a guide for
The Brave Wanderer: I made Claude play a Pokémon it never read a guide for Full timeline video of this 2,000-turn run (game frames + a live cost counter on the left, the model's real-time thinking log on the right): https://youtu.be/ewyM7mzGzTM At the end of the first article in this series , I made a promise. Fable 5's fluency in FireRed owed half its credit to the walkthroughs it had memorized — it wrote down "Oak's Parcel," an item the game hadn't shown it yet, 141 turns early. So the only honest exam is a new exam paper: "Same harness, same model, a map it cannot recite — I'll post the numbers." This article is those numbers. The exam paper is Pokémon Team Rocket Edition — the Chinese fan translation of the Spanish community hack Pokémon Edición Team Rocket, released in January 2026. You play a Team Rocket recruit working your way up from the Five Island base. Five story rounds, four regions; the Kanto chapter alone is labeled 30-35 hours for a human player. And most importantly: this game is essentially absent from the model's training data . No guide to recite. Just the screen and itself. There's also a lovely narrative twist: the hack sets your home base inside the original FireRed's Five Island Rocket Warehouse — the enemy hideout you raid late-game as the hero in the official version. Same map, opposite allegiance. Rules unchanged: vision only, one screenshot plus its own notes per turn, one button-press tool, a 2,000-action cap. The result, up front 8 hours 43 minutes, 2,000 turns, $113.44. It reached the middle of the prologue's first mission — roughly 40-60 minutes of human play time. It taught itself plenty: menus, battles, catching, the save flow, all from scratch; after losing to a fellow recruit it wrote a revenge battle plan into its notes, ground levels, and actually won the rematch; it even induced map rules like "dark blue water can't be surfed, light blue can," and maintained a dead-ends list and an NPC-interview checklist in its notes. One deta