Pokémon Legends Z-A’s self-destruct XP farm is cruel yet effective

If you’re playing an RPG, at some point you’ll likely have to fight some battles repeatedly in the name of leveling up. It’s not exciting or luxurious, but farming comes with the territory. In Pokémon Legends: Z-A, you can rack up experience points the normal way, like challenging wild monsters or taking on rival trainers. Or you can take advantage of an XP exploit that is as funny as it is cruel.

You see, some trainers in Lumiose City have monsters who know the move self-destruct. The move is exactly what it sounds like, and will cause the creature in question to spectacularly implode. With an attack rating of 200, Self-Destruct is one of the most powerful moves in the entire series. The downside is that you can’t exactly spam Self-Destruct in a battle. Unless you’re an NPC, apparently.

As X user @Anthony_0313 discovered recently, some trainers have monsters with the self-destruct ability. If you kite these encounters, the monster will immediately explode. But if you run away quickly enough, the self-destruct will activate, but you won’t actually defeat the trainer. You will, however, still get the XP from the battle. As far as the game is concerned though, it’s like the encounter never happened — so you can repeat it as many times as you like. Messed-up? Maybe. But you’re also not the trainer who is repeatedly telling their pet to knock themselves out to win a battle!

Notably, Pokémon lore stipulates that when a monster uses the move Self-Destruct, it’s not actually killing itself. Instead, Self-Destruct is simply a move that uses the creature’s entire energy in one go, and that expenditure causes it to faint. But it’s hard to imagine Game Freak intended for encounters to work like they do in this XP farm. Anthony_0313 urges players to perform the trick before it gets patched out, though it’s unclear if such a thing is even possible, since the developer cannot prevent the player from running away.

The farm may also be of particular interest to people who want to farm the Shiny Charm, which requires finishing 1,000 battles. That task will be a grind no matter what, so Self-Destruct farming could be a way to go about it if you’ve got the time and patience. This method is probably not the most efficient grind out there, but it might be the most amusing one.