Playing through a Pokemon game as it was intended is a fairly easy experience - more so nowadays than in earlier generations. That's why the Pokemon community is constantly coming up with new challenges to make the games harder. One such challenge is the "Nuzlocke" challenge where players must catch the first Pokemon they encounter in every route and discard Pokemon that faint in battle. There's even a group of Pokemon fans on Twitter playing Pokemon Red through someone's profile picture!
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Back in 2018, one Pokemon fan set themselves the challenge of completing every single game in the franchise, including every variant, in order without ever using the same Pokemon twice. The only Pokemon that they were allowed to reuse were HM Slaves - a term coined by Pokemon fans for a Pokemon that can learn lots of game progressing moves - but they were not to be used in battle unless absolutely necessary. Other than that, each team of Pokemon had to be completely unique in each game.
After just over two and a half years, redditor Volman99 has finally completed his journey. First reported by NintendoLife, Volman99 has documented the entire challenge and shares some of the stumbling blocks he faced during his challenge, one of which being the burnout he had to deal with when playing Pokemon Sun, Moon, Ultra Sun, and Ultra Moon back to back. Playing through Kanto 10 separate times also wasn't particularly enjoyable either.
Another interesting stat is that Volman99 shared are that his Pokemon contracted the very rare Pokerus virus three separate times in Pokemon FireRed, Pearl, and Sword. He also used 388 unique Pokemon including evolutions, and only found one shiny Pokemon during his challenge which was a Solosis in Pokemon White 2. You can find an album of pictures taken during Volman99's journey through each game on Imgur which includes screenshots of each final team.
Overall, Volman99 describes his playthrough as a "really refreshing way to play Pokemon" and that he used Pokemon he would have never used before like Minior and Cacturne. If you've been inspired by Volman99 to have a go at this challenge yourself, you can check out his initial Reddit post which includes the rules he used.