So I mentioned a couple days ago that I started a playthrough of Pokemon Shield using only one Pokemon, and I just finished it yesterday! And so, here's some art of the Pokemon I beat the game with, Bewear (aka Grumpy Bewear the Galar Champion :3)!

I originally wanted to do a single-Pokemon playthrough of Sword and Shield because I recently did my IDW themed playthrough, and during that playthrough I got the idea that max raid battles and candies would be OP and broken as hell if you only gave them all to one Pokemon instead of distributing them between six, so I decided to do another playthrough to test that out (I also had some prior experience with single-Pokemon playthroughs since I did one a couple years ago in Soul Silver with a Politoed named Mushy, so I kinda wanted to do another one at some point anyway). I chose Bewear to be the Pokemon I did it with both because A, it's a Pokemon that's really grown on me lately, and B, I could catch one really early in the game with only about an hour beforehand of mashing through cutscenes and setting up.

Now you may be wondering how the playthrough went, and lemme tell ya, it went far, FAR better than I thought it would. At the beginning, my goal was to have Grumpy Bewear be level 100 before fighting Leon, but I actually got to level 100 long before that. Grumpy was already level 50 before even entering Motostoke (which is before the gym challenge even begins), and he was already level 100 before entering Hammerlocke (which is right after the third gym). To put that into perspective, none of the gym leaders' Pokemon go over level 45, and the highest level Pokemon in the game, being Leon's Charizard, is only level 65. As you can imagine, that made pretty much all of the game a cakewalk, and there weren't really any fights that gave me trouble.

Playing the game this way not only made it obvious that the game clearly was not intended to be played with only one Pokemon, but it also made me learn some stuff about it. For example, it made me realize that the CPU trainers you battle with in raid battles actually scale with your Pokemon's level rather than progression or badges, so it eventually got to the point where both their Pokemon and mine could take out every Dynamax Pokemon in one or two hits. You may also be thinking that this playthrough must have taken longer because of how much grinding I did, but it was actually the opposite. My IDW themed playthrough took about 5-6 days to complete, and this playthrough only took be about 2 days to complete, so playing the game with just one Pokemon was actually a lot faster. Lesson learned, if you want to succeed in Pokemon Sword and Shield, just raise one Pokemon and no one else. Trust me, it works.