As a preface, this article will generally try to stay relatively spoiler-light, but certain major plot elements that affect gameplay will be unavoidable points of discussion once they become relevant. This will go through the beats of the game chronologically, so use your own judgment there. The gloves will be off by the end.

For this run, I opted to play the Nintendo 3DS version of the game for its ease of access and because my new, very legally acquired copy of it was sitting largely neglected, aside from a save file around Satorl Marsh, which is typically where I stop playing when I don't have the motivation to actually commit to a full playthrough. I know I could have theoretically run it on Definitive Edition instead—the Switch is just as portable—but I'm not fond of its stylistic changes to the characters and UI, so the up-and-down port it is. More importantly, Definitive Edition has an auto-run function, which goes against the spirit of the challenge. It's supposed to be painful. It's supposed to hurt me. I must give not into temptation.

After the customary run through the immutable prologue, it's off to the races, and by "the races" I mean "immediately strip my boys down to their undies and send them on a path of destruction as they beat the living daylights out of literally every monster they see". I make it out of the beginner babyzone path having grinded to about level 4 and sell my armor in town—won't be needing that!—and the challenge truly begins.

I do the usual speeding through of the intro until I've got myself my full party of 3, at which point I do not go into the cave I am supposed to be entering and instead turn around to do every single sidequest that it is currently humanly possible to access. I need that EXP to get me so, so beefed, please. I need to get juiced or else.

If you're not familiar with the way this game's combat mechanics are structured, landing hits is not completely random like in many JRPGs; your evasion and accuracy is calculated by weighing your agility stat against your opponent's, and whoever has the higher level is given a massive advantage that boosts their agility considerably the wider the gap is. If you're sufficiently overleveled, your enemies will never be able to land more than a lucky hit here or there, and attack-on-sight type monsters won't even bother engaging with you anymore.

This, as you can imagine, is something that will be incredibly relevant in a challenge run with no armor. The game is even balanced around it! Each piece of equipment has a set weight that lowers your agility by a tiny bit, leaving nakedness the way to get the highest agility you possibly can. This system gets built upon later, but for the time being, the general rule of thumb is that keeping yourself at level with your enemies is where it gets risky. I'll eventually get ways to compensate and play around it when I land in a tight matchup, but with my starting kit, I'll probably need the buffer.

If there is one way to get boatloads of levels efficiently in this game, it's by doing quests, and thankfully I have done the opening hours of this game enough times that this batch of them is second-nature to me, so it only takes an hour or two to get through them all. This places me comfortably around level 13 or so; more than strong enough to take the couple of bosses in the area. I finally enter Tephra Cave.

My first action upon entering Tephra Cave is to challenge notorious noob trap Cellar Bugworm, who promptly melts me because I have forgotten that Cellar Bugworm is hard because it poisons you. The death counter goes up to 1 and I decide to save it for another time.

After another trip back to Colony 9 to turn in the few quests that need things from here, I venture back inside and actually decide to progress the story. It goes smoothly as it ever does, and I am disappointed that I cannot remove the armor from the currently-temporary party member I gain for this brief section. Our call to action is here, and, now back down to a humble team of two, we decide to set off to see the world and take those Mechon down.

...Riiiight after turning around and doing the next batch of quests that just unlocked.

Thus ended day 1. Naked% has thus far has gone mostly swimmingly, on account of your expected defense this early not being all that much better than a flat zero, and fighting the muscle memory to skip travel back to the colony as I repeatedly swim across the entire lake creates an unbearable itch in my soul. The fact that Quick Step gems are exclusively equippable in armor feels like it's taunting me.

After starting day 2 by cleaning up the rest of the current Colony 9 quests and venturing back into Tephra (taking out Cellar Bugworm along the way, reminding me that oh yeah the weapon the game is named after is Very Strong, who knew), I move on with the story. I elect not to take another trip back to the colony to turn stray cave errands in for now, on account of there are more important things to worry about, such as my best friend being kidnapped by 100 spiders.

Once the 100 spiders are dealt with, I'm about on par with the next miniboss levelwise, so onward I go. I'll probably be fine, right?

Imagine, if you will, that you are a kid who has been cornered by two very large, very angry animals with great big horns who want to kill you very much, when suddenly two freshly college-aged guys wearing nothing but boxer briefs swoop in, refuse to elaborate on who they are, and declare that they will handle this before promptly being gored to death. This is perhaps the truest example of Shulk and Reyn acting their age in this entire game. The counter goes up to 2. I make a brief detour to squeak out the very little experience I still need to gain another level, which gives me just enough of an advantage that I can move on.

From here, it's a straight shot forward to Sharla, the game's only dedicated healer. Those familiar with this game will be aware that she has a bit of a reputation as a beginner's crutch and you can do just fine without her if you know what you're doing, but I have a sneaking suspicion she will become very mandatory in due time.

She joins the no pants club and we're on our way, by which I mean "we do every single quest in the refugee camp before moving on like always because they are missable and I want the level boost ASAP". I've done this song and dance enough times that they're rote to me now, though the added wrinkle of no skips does make it more interesting when I have to make a beeline half across the map when a thunderstorm happens so I can fight a unique monster I need for a quest. Such is the nature of weather-locked enemies; while you CAN reroll it by changing the time, it's tedious and tends to feel better to just do whatever until it happens naturally, which... also comes with the fact that you might not be fully prepared when the time comes.

As such, we're about at level difficulty with old White Eduardo and we barely squeak by, making liberal use of chain attacks to get some very necessary healing in. Sharla's wall of blue arts—typically a drawback of including her in the party, as chain attack multipliers are based around using the same color in a row and she just doesn't have most damaging colors—is actually quite welcome for a change. This early on, popping off an easy Heal Round is a matter of life and death. I find myself thinking about Shield Bullet, which nullifies a set amount of damage, more than I ever have in my life.

Save for that bump in the road, I wrap up the camp in short business and have, as intended, gotten myself to a comically overleveled 23 or so; this was all part of the plan, because this next encounter ends with an unwinnable fight against a level 25 boss, and I know from experience that you do have to actually survive until he uses the attack that ends the fight. (Amidst all of this questing, the death counter has gone up to 3 as I let a monster kill me on purpose to send me back to a landmark without using a skip; no rule against that.) I thank the stars for the timing on a series expressly designed to be chill longform background noise, which has kept me sane through this string of quests I've done a half dozen times over, and we don't waste any more time on our way to Colony 6 and the Ether Mine.

The mine is the first of a small handful of areas in this game that you could consider traditional RPG "dungeons". It's as uninteresting as it always is, made triply so by the fact that I'm not overleveled for the boss yet by the time I make it to the bottom, so I do another lap up and down it to clean up a couple quests back surface-side and grind out a level or two on the way. By the time I make it back, Xord has been bumped down a difficulty tier and I'm ready to take him on, but I have already done a comical amount of stuff today, so I leave it for tomorrow.

To begin day 3, Xord goes down smooth as butter. (After the obligatory building-up-enough-party-gauge-for-a-chain-attack portion of the fight, which takes forever just like it always does.) We blow this popsicle stand and then kill him again for good measure.

And then it's time for Dunban to show up! The guy who is actually supposed to be built around this stupid high agility no defense playstyle! The guy I've been waiting for this entire time so I can start making this build somewhat decent for everyone else! Hooray!

If you, once again, are familiar with this game, there's a decent chance you're aware of what the fandom lovingly calls the "naked Dunban strat", which is exactly what the name entails: the exact dumb build I've been playing with for the entire game, but as a dedicated, intended-by-the-designers strategy. Because, you see, Dunban has a skill at the end of one of his skill branches called "Inner Peace", which gives him a whopping +30% agility boost whenever he has no armor equipped. And, critically, he can share that skill with everybody else in the party and give them that same benefit. This is what we are working towards.

He has to earn it first though, of course. It's at the very end of the branch, where its first skill is instead a boost to aggro with no armor equipped, leaving him a heightened target without that extra assurance against getting bonked on the head. ...He'll probably be fine. (It is imperative, also, that you are aware the skill branch with the dedicated "run around naked" skills is called Wisdom.)

For the first time in I think all of the times I've played this game, Reyn gets bumped out of the party before he's got max affinity with Shulk, because the dodge tank is going to be more useful than the damage tank and I actually want to keep Sharla in for once. He comes back whenever I want to mix it up and play as Dunban, as letting the computer control Shulk will just result in him repeatedly cutting his health in half to spam Monado Speed, but Reyn's out of the rotation when I want to actually play as the main protagonist of this video game. (The Speed thing might not be so bad in this run, since it's a massive agility boost for one character for a set amount of time, if not for the fact that there does not seem to a way to remove arts and thus confiscate Battle Soul from Shulk in this version.)

We make our way through Satorl Marsh, the aforementioned area where orphaned playthroughs go to die. At one point I severely misjudge a drop and am unable to grab onto the climbing vines that my back is now turned to, which is when I decide to formally keep a recorded death counter running. It's the same as always (save for electing not to fight known problem Reckless Godwin until I can come back overleveled) and Zazadan's questline takes forever as usual, and then we can finally move on. I make it to Makna Forest, officially surpassing where I'd left off in the normal playthrough I already had a file for and superseding that as the system's "main" run.

I project Makna to be another straight shot progress-wise; two more party members, Melia and Riki, join the party in the span of an hour or two, and we run with these six for the next major chunk of the game. Before that, though, a section that has Shulk run off to do an errand alone becomes considerably scarier without the ability to skip past all of the enemies who very much want to kill me on sight, and I finagle my arts palette enough to activate Speed while wistfully missing my bizarre emulator hybrid control setup that lets me shuffle through the menus while I run.

I close off day 3 having just made it to Melia and, expecting to move onto Riki shortly after, I am cut short just as I start off day 4 by a message that tells me upon trying to collect a crystal that my inventory is full.

Oh.

It's time for the backtracking to begin.