Part 12: Emerald Dragons

Welcome to Pokémon Emerald! Did you think the glitchiness ended with Generation 2? Ha! Generation 3 has its fair share of bugs too, though like with Generation 2, there's really only one big glitch and lots of little ones. Most of what I'm covering is exclusive to Emerald, since certain new features introduced new glitches, but Ruby, Sapphire, Fire Red, and Leaf Green aren't immune to this either.

For instance, one of the biggest problems with Ruby/Sapphire was that the real-time clock had a problem where, after 365 days, the clock would suddenly freeze for 365 days. (As I understand it, anyways.) This is notable as one of the earliest games to have a glitch patched out, because when Ruby/Sapphire interacts with just about any other Generation 3 game, that game sets Ruby/Sapphire's internal clock one year forward to fix the problem.

Japanese Ruby/Sapphire had a few quirks, too. The biggest one was a glitch where using Trick to swap an enemy's hold item with Mail enough times led to a glitched state where you could turn Mail into whatever item you got.

Anyhow, for Emerald, the glitches don't happen until very late in the game, so instead of playing up to that point, I downloaded a save off GameFAQs. Surely they won't cause any problems--



Dammit, GameFAQs. Well, hopefully you guys don't mind this too much?



Also, uh, I don't how he did it, but he apparently was able to use fonts from the Japanese version in the US version? I'm pretty sure I didn't download a Japanese save...

So, as we all know, due to the hardware upgrade from Generation 2 to 3, backwards compatibility was impossible. Game Freak took the opportunity to overhaul the EV system, and it's a good thing too, no way would I ever want to knock out 400 Mews just to max out my Pokémon.

Under the new system, a stat's EVs cap at 255, and each Pokémon is allowed a maximum of 510. This not only means you have to make a choice about what bonuses you want, it also means far less battles fought. I ran the numbers, and to get the 510 EVs, a single Pokémon only really needs to fight 128 battles at most if you don't have vitamins or the PokéRus, the latter being extremely rare. If you DO have those, the number of battles can be as low as twenty-five, a HUGE improvement. However, there were still two problems with it:

1) EV grinding progress is still completely invisible to the player, because this game is about friendship, not training for glorified cockfighting.

2) If you make a mistake and get an EV you don't want, there is no way to undo it.

Now, Emerald version added a fix to problem #2. (No fix for #1 because come on, this is Game Freak, they don't want you to play the way YOU want to.) Six previously useless berries now lower EVs, one for every stat. Including HP. So, guess what the most broken item in Emerald version is?



What's that? How could Pomeg Berries be the most broken thing ever? Ahaha, you'll see! These aren't available until Fortree City, so their usefulness may be a bit limited.



I've filled up my first two boxes like so. I'll tell you right now that boxes 1 and 2 are going to get massively corrupted so anything you care about should be moved elsewhere.



Next, get a Pokémon with HP EVs down to 1 remaining HP. You'll need to know in advance whether or not a Pomeg Berry will make your HP drop by at least two. My setup is to have a Ghost with an odd number of max HP Curse two times, which puts them at 1 remaining HP, and at this level, a Pomeg Berry will definitely take off two max HP.



Thing is, the Pomeg Berry ALSO takes off two REMAINING HP. This causes my HP to underflow to 65,535! Now you've got a nigh-invincible tank!

But wait, it gets even crazier. Have everyone in the party except your 65,535 HP mega-tank and one other Pokémon faint. Enter battle and lead with the tank, switch to the other Pokémon, then exit the battle.



Then deposit the non-glitched, non-fainted Pokémon, and use any healing item on the glitched Pokémon. It gets "healed" back down to zero HP, meaning it faints. Except you won't blackout, and the game won't notice your entire team has fainted until you try to fight again, either.



When you do, you're greeted by what players call "Decamark". Or, what a blank PokéDex slot looks like!

You can also do this in Generation 4, and it's even easier since the EV-reducing berries now take an EV down to 100 if it's above 100, and if not it takes off 10 EVs like usual. For this reason, they changed EV reducing berries back to what they were in Emerald when Generation 5 came out.

Anything else I show in this post can't be done in Generation 4. However, while Pomeg Berries don't reduce EVs in other Generation 3 games, if you glitch a Pokémon's HP and trade it to another Generation 3 game, it'll still have glitched HP and you can do these tricks.



Decamark appeared because the game was forced to send out an empty slot. This causes a very weird glitch state. Notice the Cancel button. It looks normal, right?



First, view a normal Pokémon's status. Then push down until you're at the Cancel button again.



It's only half-highlighted now, and if you hold the up button, you'll start scrolling through Pokémon beyond the sixth slot, because the game now thinks there are 256 Pokémon in the party. This is not good.



When the screen color changes that's your cue to back out of the menu and either use a Fluffy Tail or blackout. I prefer avoiding the latter, though your team won't actually get healed if you blackout.

Okay, so what did that do?



Uh-oh. I think there's a problem.

In order to punish fun-havers, Generation 3 implemented numerous checks to make sure Pokémon aren't altered by external devices. Each Pokémon has four blocks of data that are read in a different order depending on its Personality Value, which determines other stuff like Gender and Ability. This data is also encrypted and has a checksum. If the checksum doesn't match the data, the game turns the Pokémon into an unhatchable "Bad Egg" which can't be deleted or released. If you force it to hatch, the game crashes.

However, back in the Pokémon menu, we were scrolling through data which isn't actually Pokémon data, almost certainly triggering the anti-cheat checks, causing that data to be altered. And even though boxed Pokémon are still Pokémon, the game doesn't need to track statuses or remaining HP for boxed Pokémon, so the game thinks they're party Pokémon with far more data than they actually do.

If that confused you, all you really need to know is, "Data was interpreted as the wrong kind of data". Other values can get corrupted, but so far there are few ways to consistently manipulate the results of this trick, which was given the best name ever: "Glitzer Popping".



We can make the best of it, though. Banette and Swablu here are still knocked out, so what happens if we take the Bad Egg and enter battle?



You can battle with it!



You can also get glitch moves as a result of the corruptions. That is the best smiley I've ever seen. What's it do?



That is beautiful.



Here's another one which crashes the game. I wanted to get the glitch move that causes trainer battles to turn into wild battles, but luck was not on my side. Glitzer Popping is very unreliable even if you can do some cool things with it.



It also doesn't help that if you go too long without a real Pokémon in the party you just...collapse.



There's something you don't see every day: Eggs with items!



This player had a Bad Egg even before I did all that. I wonder what it has?



Hmmm. Could it be a Tropius gone bad?



There is also what I like to call "Bad Egg Double Zero" because its ID is 0x00. No info displayed, but I can pick it up. Viewing its status crashes.



It can produce some weird effects.



It's even shiny.



Apparently it's a gold Bulbasaur! I got that to happen by healing, picking up the Bad Egg, swapping it with Banette and then putting Banette away.



So I gave the glitch another shot and got a regular Egg. I can use it to show off something else.



If you have only fainted Pokémon and an Egg in your party when you battle, the Egg is forced into combat, so you can see what's inside before hatching it. This applies to any Egg, not just glitch Eggs. You can even level it up - though the Pokémon returns to Level 5 when it hatches, it keeps all learned moves and evolutions! Now you can go forth and...um...break the Little Cup?



This one had more glitch moves. Nothing of interest.

So! You may wonder if there is a way to manipulate the outcome of Glitzer Popping. Supposedly, there is.



For that, we come down to the dark depths of Meteor Falls. This one, tiny room is where we can find...



...Bagon to go with our Eggs.

Aha. Bagon. Eggs.



This guy in Pacifidlog Town wants Bagon in exchange for his Horsea, which he caught on his birthday and is happy to trade away to us for some reason.



Oooooh, I will. MWAHAHAHA.



...You're kidding me right? They look nothing alike.



What we now need to do is head down to the Battle Tower. I imagine players will get the most use out of the following glitch. It's incredibly funny. You know how I didn't show off the classic cloning tricks because you technically use save corruption to do that?

This cloning trick requires no correct timing or save corruption, so it's your lucky day.



Deposit what you want to clone into the first row of Box 1. Make sure nothing else is in that box, then save. Next, withdraw what you're cloning into your party.



Talk to the lady on the far right here, enter any challenge, and when you get to the save prompt here, reset. You don't need to hit "Yes" and you don't need to time it at all.



Reload, and you'll find that the Pokémon you withdrew is still in the box. I swear I'm not making this up! I have no idea how this one slipped through, but it's nice that you can clone not only any Pokémon, but any item, too! Master Balls and Rare Candies, anyone?

Now, for this, I wanted to clone that one specific Horsea, because its Personality Value is fixed at 0x0000007F. Remember how I said each Pokémon has four blocks of data that the game reads in a different order depending on the Personality Value? With Glitzer Popping, if you're lucky, you can get it to change the order the data is read, which in practical terms, means you can have the game interpret EVs as something else. Say, its species?



Now, as I said, this is totally random and might not actually work, but if it does, you'll get an Egg with the species of however many HP and Attack EVs you had.



See? Eggs! We can check their contents by forcing the Egg into battle, of course.



Oh. It's just Horsea, unfortunately, but hey, we can check out the glitch moves.



It's...it's a move that damages the user.



Whatever this was, it never actually hit, but the target can be either side.

So since I couldn't actually get it to work, I'll instead link a video by Werster, a known Pokémon speedrunner, demonstrating for us:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOEwPnv2TFM

And there you go. The Egg actually hatches, so you do in fact get the Dex entry as well. Note that if you get a Mew or Deoxys this way, they'll never obey you, since the game is programmed not to let any Mew or Deoxys not gotten through the right event to obey you. What, you thought Pokémon was about having fun? Pffft, it was never about fun.

It was about CHAOS AND CORRUPTION! No matter which Generation, we will not rest until we've corrupted and destroyed everything. Time and again, WE WILL DO IT!

In Pokémon Colosseum, when capturing something, have the first Pokémon use the Ball, and then on the second turn, switch the slot the Ball is in with another one. Neither Ball will be consumed, allowing for INFINITE MASTER BALLS!

Also in Colosseum, if an enemy is defeated by Poison or Burn while the player has a Perish Song countdown, experience is earned not only for the knockout, but also every time the countdown decreases!

In Generation 3, under rare circumstances Wally will knock out the Ralts he's supposed to capture. In even rarer circumstances, the Ralts will be shiny! In either case, the game continues on regardless of what happened.

In Fire Red and Leaf Green, if the roaming legendary dog uses Roar to escape the battle, they're removed from the game entirely as if knocked out. Assholes!

In Emerald, if you lose a trainer battle and then knock out Lati@s, the game thinks it's still in a trainer battle so the "trainer" sends out more enemies, except you can capture one!

Ditto strikes again in Generation 4! In Japanese Diamond/Pearl, if Mimic is used to learn and then use Transform, it will permanently keep the moves of whatever it Transformed into! Ditto can also clone items!

In Japanese Platinum, you can meet the avatar of Giratina, Ace Trainer Deana, who pulls you into an endless purgatory of battles!

Did you know Sky Drop was banned in Generation 5? Here's why: In Doubles or Triples, if you use Gravity on a Pokémon affected by Sky Drop, the Sky Dropper comes down, but the target is permanently stuck not able to do anything!

Cloning returns in Generation 6 through the usual method, but that's not all! If Symbiosis is activated and attempts to pass an item to a Pokémon that just used an Eject Button, that Pokémon recieves the item fine, but next time they switch in, the item has its effect doubled! We're talking doubled Weakness Policies and QUADRUPLED Leftovers!

It never ends. IT NEVER ENDS!

This concludes this glitch exhibition of the Pokémon series! I'm happy to have been able to destroy your childhoods once again! But keep an eye out for any big discoveries in the coming years, you never know when someone will poke a new hole and bring the programming crashing down once more...!