Pokemon math goes to the moon as Scarlet and Violet gives us a new max damage record over 2 billion, and it only takes 164 turns and 100 totally-not-dead Pokemon

It’s been discovered that you can dish out over two billion damage to a poor, unsuspecting Pokemon in Scarlet and Violet in one ridiculously powerful hit, assuming you have the patience to sit through the 164 turns of setup required to pull it off.

Pokemon professor King The Luck – the same person who previously calculated how much you can possibly heal a Pokemon in a single turn – has been at it again, and has now worked out the perfect way to ensure you definitely knock out an opponent in a single hit. It all revolves around the move Last Respects – a unique Ghost-type attack which starts with a base power of 50, but is increased by 50 each time one of your Pokemon gets knocked out in a battle. For some reason, this doesn’t cap until 100 Pokemon are KO’d, so without healing items, you can use the move Revival Blessing repeatedly to bring back a fainted Pokemon and knock it out again until you’ve eventually charged Last Respects to a whopping base power of 5,050. 

Getting to this point is just the beginning, though, as you also have to ensure your Pokemon is as powerful as it possibly can be, and that its opponent is as weak as possible, which is where things get complicated. King The Luck has a Blaziken buff its critical hit rate and Attack stat with Focus Energy and Swords Dance before using Baton Pass to transfer the boosts to a Smeargle – the one who’s going to deal the enormous damage. There’s a lot of careful usage of the move Skill Swap, to give Smeargle the Huge Power ability to double its Attack stat, and pass around Power Spot so that Smeagle’s ally can buff the all-powerful painter’s moves by a further 30%. 

It doesn’t stop there, as Smeargle must use Conversion to become a Ghost type for a Same Type Attack Bonus (STAB), and repeatedly use Guard Split on a Regirock so that its own base Attack is the same as the legendary Pokemon’s Defense, which has the highest you can get in Scarlet and Violet. This brings Smeargle up to a whopping base 547 Attack before buffs. 

The opponent (another Smeargle, just to make things a bit more confusing) then has their Defense cut after being hit with Screech three times, and is hit with Reflect Type from the Ghost/Psychic-type Lunala to make it extremely weak to Ghost-type attacks. Finally, Smeargle The All Powerful fully charges up the Metronome item for a further buff by using Last Respects five times on other Pokemon, and its soon-to-be victim uses the move Glaive Rush to receive double damage on its next hit, sealing its fate further. 

Before launching its attack, the godly Smeargle Terrastalizes, increasing its Ghost-type STAB bonus, as its ally uses Helping Hand to add another attack buff. The opponent’s Oranguru, clearly hell-bent on seeing its friend suffer, uses Instruct, making Helping Hand trigger again. After all that, the ultimate Last Respects lands. And yes, it’s a critical hit, too. 

According to King The Luck’s calculations, this all equates to an astronomical 2,177,429,040 damage, scientifically known as ‘a lot.’ What’s more, the number might actually go higher than that – one commenter, aptly named ’thesharpestknife,’ points out that in the final damage calculation, it appears that Regirock’s Defense stat was inputted as 458. With that in mind, the user claims that with the correction, plus changing the “Helping Hand boost to apply to power instead of damage, you get a final score of 2,606,244,144.” 

Either way, it’s a ludicrous number you’d never need to reach in a normal Pokemon battle, but the fact that you can is ridiculously cool. I just feel rather bad for the Pokemon on the receiving end of it. 

Be sure to check out our roundup of the best Pokemon games while you’re here.