Stuck in battle vs. ghost Pokemon?

Question

I am fighting a gym leader who uses ghost Pokemon and when I went to switch to one of my weaker Pokemon (only normal moves) to heal up, the leader used mean look. I am now unable to switch out of battle and neither of us can attack eachother. Is there a way I can get out of this battle without shutting down and going back who knows how far?

Answer 1

So I'm going to assume that the Gym Leader's Pokemon only knows Ghost type moves, and you're using a Normal type Pokemon.

You don't need to shut down the game. But, based on the information, your Pokemon will faint if you continue the battle.

In addition to the 4 moves a Pokemon can know, it also knows an "extra" move called Struggle. A Pokemon will only use it if it's 4 known moves tun out of PP. Struggle is a low damage Normal type attack, that causes recoil damage to the user.

Getting back to your scenario, both you and the Gym Leader opponent will be "stuck" until the Gym Leader's Pokemon runs out of PP on it's moves, then starts using Struggle, and eventually making your Pokemon faint. You will then be able to send out another Pokemon and take advantage of a heavily, heavily weakened Ghost with no PP on any of it's moves.

Comments

Struggle is not a normal type attack. It does type-less damage.

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Interesting.  The Movedex here on the site, and on Serebii both agree it is Normal type, but Bulbapedia stats it is typeless.  That's incredibly vexing.

In that eventuality, OP's scenario becomes very hard to predict.  It would depend on how much total PP both Pokemon have, and their relative hp/attack/defense.

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All of them are accurate; PokemonDB and Serebii are just lacking detail. The move is technically Normal-type like all sites state, but only Bulbapedia mentions (accurately) that it does typeless damage.

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Thank you so much, I didn't know how far back I had saved. I'm going to start saving a lot more so I don't have to worry about this happening again.