Victory Road: Operation Overlord

After exiting out of the arena, if you're on the R route, you'll get a small cutscene with Solaris. Ignore the actual dungeon up ahead and walk into the Pokémon Centre, then talk to this guy sitting on the boxes to get a side quest: spirit hunting!

I don't know where the spirits are. There's 25 of them. Good luck. They all run Level 100 teams at that, so maybe you should come back in Tier 3 Postgame or so when you can wipe them easily. If you want the Paradox Pokémon, you need to do this eventually, but don't worry about it until later.

It Begins

♫ Pokémon Mystery Dungeon- Hidden Highland Remix ♫

I'm sorry, but this caused me simply too much stress and grief to write. Most of the puzzles will be skipped here except for the last one, and only the trainer battles will be detailed.

Maybe I'll come back to this in the future. The trainer battles are more important anyway.

You can visit this document for solutions to some of the puzzles on Victory Road.

Just Skip It

If you enable walk-through-walls, you can actually skip most of this without the events breaking due to how RPG Maker XP works. Progress through the story is tracked using an incrementing variable, but the actual variable is always set to a higher value; this means as long as you hit the hidden event object that sets the E19 Story variable to the final few values you'll be able to skip most of the events here.

Obviously, do a backup save before this. Just walk around through the areas until you find the crystal star puzzle; you'll still need to go into the four rooms to get the crystal key pieces but you can skip all of the minecart puzzles and the logic puzzles this way without issue. I can assure you; you aren't missing out on any major

(If anyone asks, I did NOT say it was okay to do this.)

The Evil Puzzle

Welcome back from the intermission. The crystal star puzzle is the only puzzle you can't just skip as the warp is embedded into the immovable door; and the combination for the lock is generated randomly at the start of the game. My combination won't work for you and vice-versa.

Directly below here is a warp to the cave room with the four crystal rooms; the wall of crystals in each has now been removed and you can freely traverse them. This is where your final set of actual battles are! After solving the room, find the lowest areas and pick up your three crystal stars.

Blue Room

The Sapphire floor has Blake waiting beyond some ice puzzles (check the document linked above for the solution.) Beat him up and collect the Sapphire stars.

Green Room

This is the most obnoxious room of them all; Fern will constantly throw arrows at you which knock you back to the lower area and cause all of your Pokémon to take damage each time. You need to maneuver around the room in order to open a path to the top cliffs; from there, you can activate a crystal to reflect the arrow back at Decidueye. Do this three times (and definitely DON'T use walk through walls to make it there...) then go through the cave at the very top of the room to collect the Emerald stars.

Purple Room

After a small cutscene, you'll be chased by an evil Gardevoir. The purple crystals won't do anything when you interact with them here; you need to guide the Evil Orb over them to unlock the next area. If you get hit by the Evil Orb you'll get teleported back to the previous room. This is more tedious than challenging; turn off speedup and wait by the crystal. Collect the Amethyst stars and teleport back.

Red Room

This room is yet another tedious backtracking maze; just wander through it (there's only one path) or clip through to the upper right to make it to the cutscene room. Save your game before you go down the path to meet the Gang; then go down the rocks for a long cutscene and a double battle with Sirius. (This is a really bad cutscene.)

Solving The Puzzle

The actual puzzle here is to insert a crystal star of a specific type (RSEA) into each slot in the wall. Like I said, the combination is specific to your save and was baked in at the very start, so I can't just tell you the answer, but there's an easy way to solve it in roughly ~20 guesses.

1. Put a star into the first slot
2. Step on the pad to check the combination
3. If a new indicator on the right lit up, move onto the next slot. ELse, retry with a different type of star.

This takes about 5 minutes to bruteforce. When you're done, move onto the newly opened area.

Fuck You, Fern

After all of that, one more fight remains; Fern.

Afterwards, there's a long-ish cutscene; when you're ready, leave Victory Road to find the Pokémon League.