Experience With Pokémon Glitches?

[FlareTheBlitz]

I recently dove down the rabbit hole of the many, many glitches in the Pokémon series, and I wanted to share my experiences with them, and hear from you guys if you've messed around with glitches like this before!

A couple years ago, I started a casual playthrough of Pokémon Red, mainly just to see how the series began (I would recommend playing Fire Red/Leaf Green instead, the original games are held together by duct tape.and Elmer's glue). Eventually, I reached Cinnabar Island, and decided to have some fun. That's right, it was time to summon the abomination known as Missingno! I ended up catching quite a few, as well as Missingno's lesser known cousin, M', and all was right with the world.

Fast forward to earlier this year, I decided that I wanted to REPLAY Pokémon Red and Blue, and try to complete the Pokédex. I quickly found out that one of the 151 Pokémon in the Dex, Mew, was only accessible via glitches, without straight up cheating. This led me down the path of the Trainer-Fly glitch, when you fly away from a trainer AFTER they have already spotted you, leading the game to THINK you're in a battle, evesn though you can freely explore the overworld. With the glitch, I caught a Mew, and more notably, a Level 100 Gengar before I even reached Pewter City.

But even THAT wasn't enough for me. Last week, I went all in. It was time to break the fabric of Pokémon reality itself. It was time for arbitrary code execution.

To put it simply, arbitrary code execution, better known as "ACE," is when you glitch the game SO BAD that you can just write code WITHIN THE GAME ITSELF and have the game run it. Doing some sort of weird ritual which involves getting 255 glitch Pokémon in your party, switching around items and tossing Master Balls and TMs in a VERY specific way, you can get an item known simply as "4F". When you use this item, a nickname screen will show up, and by entering specific nicknames, you can do literally ANYTHING you want. Do you want infinite Master Balls and Rare Candies? Done. How about changing a Pokémon's nickname, EVs and IVs, species, or even whether the Pokémon is shiny or not? Easy. And the list goes on (If you wanna learn more about this dark magic, check out the Glitch City Wiki! They have a TON of info about ACE and TONS of other Pokémon glitches).

(Side note, think about how absurd this process would be in the actual Pokémon world to an outside observer. Your son just turned 10 years old, and is about to start their Pokémon journey. They exit your house, then walk straight back in. Suddenly, they start digging through their item pouch, which is supposed to be empty, but now acts like a Bag of Holding. They pull out 249 Master Balls out of thin air, throw them on the ground, then leave like nothing just happened.)

Alrighty, that's enough about me and my knowledge of the dark arts. How about you guys? Do you guys ever mess around with glitches?

 

[Mirage]

My first game that I actually understood anything that was going on was Pokemon Emerald, by which point there weren't very many easy glitches left, but there was one that was still pretty accessible. If you turned off the GBA in a specific place in Emerald while saving the game (I thiiiiiink it was the Battle Tower?), you'd actually be able to clone a Pokemon, as well as its item too! Not as game breaking as what Gen 1 had, but you could still get unlimited Master Balls and multiple of each legend if you wanted, albeit much more slowly.

Ironically, other than that, probably my other main experience was with launch day Scarlet and Violet. SO many janky glitches - if anyone reading this never got to play Scarlet and Violet early in its life, you owe it to yourself to watch one of the glitch compilations from the era, something like this one. They were epic

 

[CuteBunnyGirl]

When I played gen 1, I used the pokedoll glitch and the X accuracy glitch in my playthrough.

The pokedoll glitch lets you run from the ghost Marowak without a Silph Scope by using a pokedoll at it and the X accuracy glitch makes every move 100% accurate if you use an X accuracy. (yes, that includes 1 hit KO moves)

 

[FlareTheBlitz]

If you turned off the GBA in a specific place in Emerald while saving the game (I thiiiiiink it was the Battle Tower?), you'd actually be able to clone a Pokemon, as well as its item too!

Yep, the Battle Tower cloning glitch (the fact that I know what glitch you're talking about immediately shows how broken my brain is from all these glitches). Basically, when you shut off your console at that specific time, the Pokémon in your party ARE saved, but the Pokémon in your boxes are NOT saved. ONLY in the Battle Tower (I'm 99% sure), you can abuse this to clone Pokémon.

When I played gen 1, I used the pokedoll glitch and the X accuracy glitch in my playthrough.

Ah yes, The Pokédoll glitch. It's such a simple glitch, but is VERY useful, especially in speedruns (that's an actual speedrun strat lol). I didn't know about the X Accuracy glitch though, that's absurd! Does the X Accuracy glitch still fail with the 1 in 256 glitch? (A glitch where moves with 100% accuracy have a 1/256 chance to miss due to one bad line of code)