Part 8: Yellow Version Reds

You know, I never liked Pokémon Yellow. It felt like an uneeded cash-in on the previous games, Pikachu didn't add much to the game for me, and in keeping with the TV Show's theme of making Pokémon less fun for everybody, the difficulty is lower as a result of Gym Leaders having less Pokémon in their teams. They even patched out some glitches, notably the Old Man glitch, Brock Skip, and the Cable Club Escape is harder. The glitches they didn't fix can't really do anything we haven't seen in this version.

OR SO I THOUGHT. Most of what you can do in Yellow Version can indeed be done in the other versions, but Yellow actually makes some glitches harder and others easier, so let's get into this!



First, however, some of the tricks require a fresh save. A COMPLETELY fresh save. If you're playing along, use Up+Select+B to clear your save, it'll be necessary for something later on.



The opening isn't too noteworthy, though if you wanted to do the glitch with the girl NPC, she has to be one space higher than she needs to be in Red/Blue for the pathing to break.



Pikachu doesn't seem to take too kindly to his new trainer. Believe me, the feeling is mutual, buddy.



We can fix it though. Yellow Version introduces a prototype of the Happiness system in later games, but it's completely busted. All you have to do to get Pikachu to like you is to use a Potion on him dozens of times. This raises its happiness even though it has no effect!



You can max out his happiness at the beginning of the game...not that it matters.



Uh. Oak. How is Pikachu your "old" Pokémon if you caught it five minutes ago?



Moving onto Viridian Forest, this trainer here was not there in Red/Blue. For reasons I cannot fathom this trainer was added here and given maximum vision range.



I'd ask how they could possibly not know this would happen, but then again, they didn't catch onto the Mew glitch by the time the game came out.



Oh, by the way, the constant shifting of colors isn't my doing, it's a feature of Yellow Version that every town now has its own color, and every Pokémon now has its own color. These are the same colors you get when playing Red/Blue on a Super Game Boy or Pokémon Stadium.



Well, at least this fight is much easier. Pikachu's a bit of a glass cannon, but at least Eevee can't resist all of his moves.



And what's this? They bothered to fix the text overwriting itself but left out the "y" in "try"!

Wow that sounds like it could be a proverb.



So obviously I'm doing all this as part of the Mew Glitch. My most recent encounter was this Rattata that I caught, so I should be getting...



Wait Level SEVEN? I was sure I had Growled six times!...does capturing reset what the level will be? Strange...



I went back and tried it again and got this. I'm cool with it, I need a Venusaur anyways.



Eeeesh. Yellow Version has much improved spritework, but they were not kind to Venusaur.



So, everyone knows Pikachu can react to certain NPCs in this game, like Jigglypuff and Bill.



Talking to Jigglypuff makes Pikachu fall asleep and we can walk around freely withouth him.



So stand on this column and walk up and down for a few minutes...



Oh dear.



OH MY GOD WHAT IS HAPPENING!



Say something, Pikachu!



Okay there's no WAY I have been playing that long!



Oh dear. We're stuck now.

So yeah, Pikachu not being on the screen can cause...problems. Very strange. Maybe it'll be helpful in the future.



In the meantime, we beat down Brock, whose only change is his vest, which doesn't help him at all.



Here's something I haven't brought up. If you pay attention, you'll notice that when recieving the Boulder Badge or the Earth Badge, you get the "Level Up" jingle. You don't get that for any other badge, in fact for some of them you get a glitched drum sound. This happens because they used the wrong sound bank. Pretty odd that Yellow didn't fix it at all.



And because Brock Skip doesn't work, here's the shorts kid everyone likes for some reason.

Even though he Wrap-spammed you all to unconciousness back in the day.



Next we're going to duplicate our items the usual way. Except the earliest you can encounter Missingno. in Yellow is technically Misty, since her Starmie has the right Special, and the Trade NPC isn't there anymore, I think.



So I heal at the Route 4 Pokémon Center and escape from this Bug Catcher.



Mt. Moon has a trainer right inside the first room for re-enabling the Start button.



Important!



We then fight Misty, who...talks like that for some reason? This isn't even accurate to her personality in the TV Show.



Important: Have at least one Pokémon faint. Then finish her.



Deposit everything except the fainted Pokémon to black out back to Route 4. You have to do this because you can't pass the ledge otherwise.



Make sure NOT to encounter anything else on your way back. Also, you can withdraw your Pokémon now.



Oh don't you make that face at me, you had it coming!



So, here we are! We should be getting Missingno. now.



Uh...the fadeout is much longer than normal.



It screeches for blood and it freezes.

Missingno. and other glitch Pokémon tend to differ between versions. In Yellow - at least, English Yellow - Missingno. is known to freeze the game often, making item duplication far less practical unless (as usual) you encounter the Ghost or Skeleton forms. The Special needed for that is 182, 183, or 184, however, and you have to wait far longer to encounter Ditto.

The actual reason "Yellow Missingno." freezes the game is because uncompressing his sprite corrupts a thankfully unused chunk of the save file. What it gets corrupted with depends on what was already there, so to encounter Yellow Missingno. without a freeze you just have to keep trying until it works. There are Gameshark codes and methods involving external programs and our old pal, Arbitrary Code Execution, to make Missingno. safe on your save.

If you cleared the save file like I did, your first encounter should go smoothly without a hitch. At least, that's what I thought, but he still froze it on the first attempt for me. So, in the interest of saving time, I edited the RAM so the game would not freeze.



There we go. Not a lot to say about Missingno. other than what you saw in Red/Blue.



Well, his moves are a little different. Pay Day and Bind on top of Water Gun.



And apparently a stupidly low catch rate?



It's gonna turn into Rhydon (which is actually very helpful) so I should point out that Missingno. has a very glitched EXP curve in Yellow Version. Any amount of EXP gained sends him down to Level 1 and no amount of EXP will get him to Level 2. Rare Candies work, but you'll still drop to Level 1 if you gain EXP with him.



Also, Yellow Missingno. causes THAT to happen if you "survive" the encounter.



You are WAY too happy about this. Warping out of the area somehow fixes this effect.

We head back to Cerulean City and...



WHAT. Uh...someone important seems to be missing.

Now, when I saw that, I was befuddled. I've gotten NPCs to disappear after a Mew Glitch, but not THAT one! After seeing that happen I asked the Pokémon glitch community about it, and they dug a little deeper. What did they find?

Short version: The Mew Glitch can make any NPC that can disappear, disappear permanently.

Long version: Entering an area makes the game load a list of NPCs that disappear from the map. These NPCs have a text box associated with them, so that if say you talk to Mewtwo and battle him, the game can then say, "Okay that wild battle wasn't generated at random, and the most recent text box is box 4 so according to the list NPC 21 disappears".

When a Mew Glitch encounter occurs, the game recalls the most recent text box (for the MAP, that is. If the game tries to recall a text box that doesn't exist for that map then problems can occur, which is why we press start before finishing the glitch) then the battle starts. The Start menu also counts as a text box and it's NEVER on that list. The game always assumes an NPC disappears when it runs that function so it has to delete something on the list, but if there's no matching text box, what does it do?

Whenever the game loads the list of disappearing NPCs for a map, it just overrides what it had in memory and doesn't erase anything past the "End of list" marker. So if it has to delete an NPC, and no NPC's text box matches, it just deletes the NPC appearing immedietely after the end-of-list marker.

So, to sum all this up, if you enter a map with five NPCs that disappear, then have the Mew Glitch occur in a map with only three, NPC #4 on that list gets deleted. In this case, the Cerulean Cave guard. Cerulean City has five disappearing NPCs, and Viridian Forest has three, which are all item pickups. Is your head hurting yet? You can use this to fight Sabrina early, enter Cerulean Cave early, skip Snorlax as I did in Red/Blue, and skip meeting Bill (I think.)

And to think nobody had really looked into all this until I brought it up. I feel special!



Okay, back to the game. Did you know that Pikachu has a special animation when he learns Thunderbolt or Thunder? Did you also know that the animation briefly lights up Rock Tunnel? Ha! Who needs Flash, anyways?



My last trick for this update will be an early Ditto encounter, because you probably don't want to wait until Cinnabar Island. (Though they also appear in Cerulean Cave in Yellow, and that just opened up, heh.) So we're gonna use not just one Mew Glitch...



But TWO of them at once. I set up the first, change PC boxes to save, reset, then set up the other one.



Sadly only two trainers have the Special needed to generate Ditto. Both are in Silph Co. and the relevant Pokémon is the third and final in their teams, so you'll need to lose to them after knocking out the first two.



There's our Ditto from the first encounter! After it Transforms you can go to the second encounter to get whatever you wanted.

And that will be all for this update! There's more to come for Yellow Version, but I have to run some errands on my way to Cinnabar Island so that's going to take some time. Next time: The number 255 and why this game doesn't like it!