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Pokemon Stadium (Nintendo 64)

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Zoropirates edited this page Sep 1, 2026 · 5 revisions

Retro Achievements Guide
Pokemon Stadium (N64)

Pokemon Stadium - Key Art

Preamble (please read the first paragraph)

This guide wound up being massive. Everything would not fit on 1 page, not even 2 pages. It requires a whole 3 pages just to fit all the content on Github. For the sake of consistency I'm going to make it 4 pages, with this being the landing page for the guide--carrying the intro setup guide, and mechanics overview. Round 1 and Round 2 pages will only have guides for completing each tournament in those rounds with rentals only. The extras page will have all other achievements.

Pokemon Stadium was released on 30 Apr, 1999 on the N64 and is the second game that allows players to see their Pokemon in glorious 3D (after Pocket Monster Stadium that was never released outside of Japan). It allowed players to use their Pokemon they caught and trained through their Pokemon journeys through the use of the Transfer Pak, or provided rental Pokemon for those of us who couldn't get our hands on those peripherals. It also provided a host of party minigames for those who wanted a break from battling.

Table of Contents

Click here ◂ to toggle open the individual achievement table of contents

💎 Achievement Guide

Pokemon Stadium - RetroAchievements Mastery Icon 
Set consists of 72 achievements worth 877 points

Set released on 10 Aug, 2019

General Info

Introduction

At the time of writing this guide, this set sports a 2.9% mastery rate. I hope to make this set more approachable for players interested in completing it with this guide. There will be 3 sections:

  1. Setting up the transfer pak in your emulator.
  2. Walkthrough for the whole game with rentals.
  3. Minigame tips and strategies.

By the end of this guide you will have everything you need to earn that retro Mewtwo badge!

For the battle section, I will mostly be compiling information from this guide by BananaBoatKid originally posted on the speedrun guides tab on speedrun.com. For each cup I will be sharing a team of rentals, telling you which 3 to pick for each battle, then providing matchups for the opposing team's Pokemon.

I will also include damage calc tables for how much damage each of your Pokemon are capible of doing in case you get in a sticky situation compiled from this spreadsheet by quo originally posted on the speedrun resources tab. They will be formatted like this:

Your Pokemon | Enemy Team (Enemy Pokemon HP) Attacking Move | Damage Range Crit Damage Range

Since HP is visible in this game, this should be helpful for critical decisions.

Finally, team lists were scrapped from Serebii. I caught a few mistakes in their lists, but I may not have caught them all. Please let me know if something is incorrect, or feel free to edit this page and fix it yourself.

I won't sugarcoat it. The rentals provided are almost all trash. Their movesets are abyssmal and they're all at the lowest level possible for the provided cup (except Prime Cup where everything is 100). That said, it can be done!

Note

Pokemon is inherently an RNG based game. You can lose at any point or win from a hopeless situation due to a well placed crit, miss, string of para hax, or any other number of situations. Your goal will be to minimize your reliance on RNG to win, while it cannot be removed entirely, the Speedrunning community has done a great job of reducing it as much as possible with what is provided to us.
With that said, don't get too upset when BS happens. Take a break when you need to, and keep grinding until the RNG lines up!

⚙️ Transfer Pak Setup Guide

Save preparation

There are 4 achievements that require the use of the Transfer Pak.

Important

When you have your transfer Pokemon ready including your Mewtwo, Pikachu, and 4 other Pokemon, save in a Pokecenter before starting Pokemon Stadium!

You will need a Pokemon Red, Blue, or Yellow save file. On it, you will want to at LEAST put together a proper level 100 Mewtwo to carry you through 25+ completions of Prime Cup Master Ball required for It's All a Blur. You will also need at least 6 Pokemon total to make a complete transfer Pokemon team including a Pikachu.

As Nelson Tangela said in this Smogon thread:

"Amnesia Mewtwo is legal in Gym Leader Castle and Prime Cup.  
Add something to switch into random Electrode.  
What else do you need?"

I recommend the following moveset:

Level 100 Mewtwo

  • Amnesia
  • Psychic
  • Recover
  • Substitute

I personally ran ice beam instead of substitute and regret it. The ONLY way this Mewtwo dies is from a string of para hax, which substitute will more or less negate most of. Very few Pokemon will be able to break the substitute in 1 turn, and only Exeggutor and Slowbro can eat multiple amnesia boosted psychics. After 2 uses of amnesia, Mewtwo's special will be maxed, and you can sweep any team.

If you want sweepers for the other cups, this guide by Magicxgame on Smogon suggests the following mons:

Click here ◂ to see Pika Cup mons
Level 20 Starmie
  • Surf
  • Psychic
  • Thunderbolt
  • Blizzard
Click here ◂ to see Petit Cup mons (total combined level in round cannot exceed 80):

  1. Level 30 Gastly
    • Psychic
    • Thunderbolt
    • Mega Drain
    • Explosion / Substitute
  2. Level 25 Dratini
    • Agility
    • Wrap
    • Substitute
    • Dragon Rage
  3. Level 25 Abra
    • Psychic
    • Thunder Wave / Counter
    • Substitute / Counter
    • Seismic Toss
Click here ◂ to see Poke Cup mons (total combined level in round cannot exceed 155):

  1. Level 55 Starmie
    • Surf
    • Psychic
    • Blizzard
    • Recover
  2. Level 55 Tauros
    • Body Slam
    • Earthquake
    • Blizzard
    • Thunderbolt
  3. Level 50 Rhydon
    • Earthquake
    • Rock Slide
    • Substitute
    • Body Slam
  4. Level 50 Chansey
    • Minimize
    • Seismic Toss
    • Thunder Wave
    • Softboiled
  5. Level 50 Zapdos
    • Thunderbolt
    • Drill Peck
    • Thunder Wave
    • Substitute
  6. Level 50 Exeggutor
    • Sleep Powder
    • Psychic
    • Mega Drain
    • Explosion

Thanks again to Magiacxgame for suggesting these pokemon! I personally didn't use them :) I only created the Mewtwo for my playthrough and used rentals for everything else since rentals will be required for the final rounds later. But transfered Pokemon make the rest of the game significantly easier.

You can quickly train up your selected Pokemon with the missingno glitch to dupe rare candies, TMs, and vitamins.

Connecting the Save to Mugen64Plus Core

I assume most of us are using Retroarch. Connecting your save is simple, but not very intuitive.

Prepare your Files

Start by making copies of your gb rom and save and put them in the same folder as your Pokemon Stadium rom.

Pasted image 20260811155201

If your save is .srm, rename it to .sav, then rename your saves to be the same as your n64 rom, like this: Pasted image 20260811155318

Load them into Retroarch

Now open Retroarch and load your Mugen64Plus core.

On the main menu, select "Subsystems" > "Load N64 Transferpak" > your rom save file

Pasted image 20260811155624 Pasted image 20260811155757 Pasted image 20260811155908

Do that 2 more times and select the gb rom, and n64 rom. It will look like this:
Pasted image 20260811160345

Now click Start N64 Transferpak to load the game, and you will see your file on the main screen: Pasted image 20260811160438

Great! Now that you have your Mewtwo and whatever else you decided to prepare, let's get into the unique battle mechanics.

💥 Battle Mechanics

For players coming from future games, the gen 1 battle mechanics can feel a bit confusing. Even if you are familiar with RBY mechanics, Pokemon Stadium is full of patches that can make it sometimes feel like things aren't happening like they should.

For in-depth guides, please see these Smogon guides by Plague von Karma:

  1. Pokemon RBY Battle Mechanics
  2. Pokemon Stadium Battle Mechanics

I will summarize the above guides here to help you get an understanding of what to expect. I will list out relevent RBY mechanics and specify whether or not this was meaningfully changed in Pokemon Stadium.

  • Special Stat combines Special Attack and Special Defense.
  • Critical hit rates are based on Pokemon's speed. (Modified in Stadium to increase the rates on slower mons and decrease the rate on higher mons)
  • Physical and Special moves are based on type.
    • Physical Types: Normal, Fighting, Rock, Ground, Ghost, Flying, Poison, Bug
    • Special Types: Grass, Fire, Water, Ice, Electric, Psychic, Dragon (no dragon moves that use this)
  • Type interaction differences
    • Poison and Bug are super effective against each other
    • Fire does not resist Ice
    • Ghost does not affect Psychic
  • Same Type Status Immunity--if a Pokemon has the same type as a move used on it, the secondary effect will not be applied. Examples (+the only exception):
    • Body Slam does not paralyze Normal types
    • Thunderbolt does not paralyze Electric types
    • Flamethrower does not burn Fire types
    • Twineedle DOES poison Bug types
  • All statuses can be applied to the same type through status moves, except for poison on Poison types
  • Stat drops from burn and paralysis can be reapplied when other stats are changed with a stat buff or debuff move (patched in Stadium).
  • Stat buff moves can remove and ignore the debuff from burn or paralysis if the same stat is buffed (patched in Stadium).
  • Stats are capped at 999, further buffing moves for that stat will fail.
  • Stat cap of 999 can be broken, causing an overflow and making the stat an extremely low number (patched in Stadium).
  • Frozen Pokemon cannot be thawed without an item, or being hit by Haze or a move that can cause burn.
  • Pokemon can sleep up to 6 turns including the turn where it was put to sleep, and it cannot attack on the turn it wakes up. (Nerfed to 3 turns and only 1 Pokemon can be put to sleep at a time in Stadium)
  • Confusion damage uses the Pokemon's raw attack stat taking into consideration stat changes, but ignoring Reflect. It will last 1-4 turns and have a 50% chance to attack itself per turn.
  • If either Pokemon has substitute up while someone attacks itself in confusion, the confusion damage will be applied to the opponent's substitute but not its own.
  • Paralysis lowers Speed by 75%
  • Burn lowers Attack by 50%
  • Bad Poison (from Toxic) starts a counter that will increase each turn, increasing the damage done to the Pokemon. If swapped out, the counter will reset to 1 and the poison will be changed to normal poison that does not increase the damage done.
    • If leech seed is applied during Bad Poison, its damage will increase with the poison damage. Rest does not reset the damage increase for leech seed, and if the Pokemon is subsequently burned, the burn damage will be increased as well. (rest was patched in Stadium).
  • When a Pokemon faints end-of-turn effects are skipped (e.g. recoil damage or poison damage).
    • If Hyper Beam KOs an opponent the recharge turn will be skipped (patched in Stadium)
  • If a multi-hit attack crits, all hits will crit.
  • Pokemon cannot fight back if they are trapped by Wrap, Bind, Clamp, or Fire Spin.
    • Either Pokemon can switch out during the move, but the attacker will automatically use the trapping move again even at 0 PP (neither side can attack on a switch out in Stadium).
  • All moves except Bide and Swift have a 1/256 chance to miss (changed to 1/65536 in Stadium).
  • Recovery moves fail if the max HP and current HP havea difference of 255 or 511 (patched in Stadium).
  • Damage stored for Bide and Counter may not be reset for some moves, thus causing it to stack with the previous damage stored (patched in Stadium).
  • There are too many move differences to list here, please see the guides above. But here are a few highlights.
    • Substitute blocks draining moves like Mega Drain, not taking any damage.
    • Users of substitute can self KO.
    • Self Destruct and Explosion do not self KO against substitute (they self KO against substitute in Stadium).
    • Seismic Toss and Night Shade work against ghost and normal types respectively.
    • Bide works against Ghost types and can hit Pokemon in the sky or ground (all reversed in Stadium)
    • Counter only works against Normal and Fighting type moves.
    • Struggle does not hit Ghost types (patched in Stadium)
    • If Dig or Fly are interrupted by para or confusion, the pokemon retains the semi-invulnerable state (patched in Stadium).
    • Haze removes status conditions as well as stat changes.
    • OHKO moves only work against Pokemon that are slower than the user, taking stat changes into consideration.
    • Dizzy Punch does not confuse.
    • Psywave does 1 damage to 1.5x the users level in damage.
    • Focus Energy is broken and decreased the crit rate by 4x (patched in Stadium)

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