#I hope this causes someone immense psychic damage and a double take

[figs-oliomedley]

Lloyd and Morro, with a classpecting twist! ;>

[ianmrid]

...It's The Master Plan!

OK, strap yourself in; this one is a bit of a roller coaster.

For a good long while, I was pretty convinced that there was no way I could glitch either Mew or Deoxys into the Gen3 games, as I had done in Gen1 for Mew and Gen2 for Celebi, until I stumbled across a glitch known as Glitzer Popping. I have no idea why it is called this - it seems that it was intentionally picked to mean nothing specific, but also to not sound too generic.

A French hacker known as Metarkai fond a way to exploit some pre-existing glitches even further, allowing you hatch any pokémon you could wish for, and then these exploits were then documented in video guide form by a YouTuber called ChickasaurusGL. And man, are they ever complex. I am not going to even pretend I understand this stuff - it is way more complex than any of the glitching I have tried out previously - but I’m going to summarise the process in really basic terms. However, if you are interested in the original video, it’s linked below, but beware: it is is over an hour long!

In very basic terms, the glitch uses a bug known as the Pomeg Berry glitch in order to allow you to access the pokémon in your PC boxes during a battle - something you shouldn’t be able to do. This works by taking a Ghost-type pokémon that knows the move Curse. Curse reduces the HP of the pokémon by half - rounded down - in order to inflict damage each turn on your opponent. The ‘rounded down’ part is how to exploit the glitch. You essentially use Curse twice with a Ghost-type that has an odd number of HP, guaranteeing you are left with just 1HP. You can then use a Pomeg Berry on the pokémon, which reduces it’s Hit Point EVs, dropping it to 0HP without it having to be in battle, so it doesn’t truly faint. Now, when you enter a battle, you have no non-fainted pokémon in your party and the game glitches, sending out a placeholder icon known as Decamark (??????????).  Once this happens you can open your pokémon party screen and scroll off the bottom, accessing pokémon that are stored in your PC boxes.

Accessing the pokémon in this way can cause them to become corrupted, turning them into eggs. You can then repeat the process an double ‘corrupt’ into something referred to as indicator pokémon. This part is where it gets tricky. To achieve it you need to use pokémon with specific stats, specific EVs, specific moves, and specific hidden IDs. These hidden IDs can’t be known in-game with the exception of the pokémon available as trades from  NPCs. Since these are predictable values you can corrupt them by giving them the stats/EVs/moves needed. 

I figured the easiest way to try it out would be to attempt it alongside the video. The glitch only works on either non-English EU cartridges or US cartridges, so I was going to have to buy another copy of Pokémon Emerald since mine was an English EU copy. This was fine - it’s not like I would risk corrupting my existing save file, containing all the hard work I’d put in so far, so I turned to the internet and eventually managed to obtain a US copy of Emerald. It took a while as there are a huge number of fake GBA cartridges on eBay and, despite my best attempts to be careful, I ended up with a few duds before I got a genuine one. 

I threw together a very random team, since I needed to play through Emerald again to get to a certain point where I could try out the glitch. They needed to b high enough level to make things easy but not so high they wouldn’t listen to me. I’m not going to do a full entry on this team but here is a brief round up below:

Moone the Lunatone: I flip-flop on whether I prefer Solrock or Lunatone - and I was obviously in a Lunatone mood when selecting this team. The Rock- and Psychic-typing came in very useful in the early game where you normally wouldn’t see it.

Zippy the Banette: The key pokémon for this glitch as it is a Ghost-type that was able to learn curse. Curse behaves differently with non-Ghost-types so Banette was one of the few options available to me to execute the glitch.

Banquet the Swalot: A rather under-rated pokémon, it was nice to give Swalot an outing as it had a suitable level to make the game easy, but not risk getting too over-levelled.

Guy the Breloom: As with Lunatone and Swalot, Breloom was fully evolved but not too high a level to be useful. The part-Fighting type made short work of the early game Normal-types.

Humph the Camerupt: Since the glitch involves hatching eggs, I sent over Camerupt who has the Magma Armour ability. This reduces the amount of steps it takes for eggs to hatch, which could be handy.

Demi the Sharpedo: Originally a member of XD team until Walrein and Sableye ended up providing the same type-coverage. I needed a Water-type to get about, so I decided to give Demi a second chance to shine.

And here they all are (they still get a pic as I still played a full game with them pretty much!):

After smashing my way through the game as quickly as possible, and obtaining the in-game trade pokémon required, I configured them correctly and I was able to make the stages above work correctly. I used Bannette to correctly carry out the Pomeg Berry part of the exploit with no issue, and I even succeeded in the single/double corruption required to get he Indicator Pokémon. So far, so good.

The next bit is where it got really complex. I had to capture some Smeargle to transform them into Mew and Deoxys. It had to be Smeargle, due to it’s ability to learn any move through the use of its signature move, Sketch. Again they had to be set up a certain way - including being fed certain combination of pokéblocks to ensure the created Mew/Deoxys would be obedient, since this flag was usually set by the event item - a step we were skipping completely. I finally obtained and set up my Smeargle and now all I had to do was to double corrupt them, however...

I. Just. Couldn’t. Make. It. Work.

I just don’t know why. Things started out OK; I managed the single corruption stage after a couple of attempts, but try as I might I just couldn’t manage the double corruption step. Every single damn time, the Eggs remained the same. Now, it could be pure dumb bad luck since there is only a percentage chance of each corruption/double corruption working, but the chance is high enough that I would have thought I’d have seen a success at least once, given the number of times I tried. Additionally, there is no way to know for sure whether or not you are just endlessly trying out the same procedure over and over, with no hope of getting the desired result because you have screwed up a step earlier in the process. At one point, to try and mitigate that possibility, I started all over again, right from Step 1 of the glitch, but I ran into the same brick wall.

This was so disappointing. It was worse knowing there was a way to do this that I just seemed unable to achieve than when I thought Mew and Deoxys were simply impossible to obtain. In my frustration, and after spending many hours failing, I turned back to the internet and searched even deeper, looking for any other articles about the glitch, some clearer or easier instructions, anything! And then a ray of hope: Distribution ROMs.

Back in the day, before all games were online and internet compatible, whenever there was a event during which you could be transferred a rare pokémon, you actually had to go to a specific location - usually a store or festival of some sort - between certain dates and take your GBA with you. You would then be linked up to an on-site GBA which was running a specific cartridge that just distributed a rare pokémon or item direct to your save file. A good example of this would be the Old Sea Map which was an event-only item that was required in order to encounter Mew in-game. The distributions ran only in Japan during part of 2005, for attendees of either the Pokémon Festa convention or the PokéPark theme park. Incredibly, over on the site digiex, someone has manage to obtain ROMs of these original distributions, meaning it is theoretically possible to receive the event pokémon as if you were actually present at the time it occurred!

Now. Does this count as legitimate? The obvious answer is no - and that is true in as much as it only really ‘counts’ if you obtained it via the event legitimately at the time. But since this also means my Gen1 Mew and my Gen2 Celebi also don’t count ‘officially’ as they were obtained by glitching, I think this is an acceptable solution to my problem. I would argue that this is actually more authentic than if I had been able to glitch the game as described above, and certainly doesn’t violate my ‘no Action Replay’ rule. It is as close to the genuine experience as it is possible to get nearly 15 years after the fact. Now fulloy self-justified it was back to eBay to buy a GBA flash drive and a memory card.

First up; Deoxys. Deoxys was able to be encountered in-game once you got a hold of the item the Aurora Ticket. This could be used on the ferry to reach the otherwise inaccessible Birth Island. I loaded the Aurora Ticket distribution ROM onto my flash drive and managed to send my Emerald save file an Aurora ticket at my first attempt - it worked perfectly! As soon as I had the ticket, I headed to Birth Island and captured Deoxys - something I never though I would be able to do in Gen3! It was immensely satisfying and I enjoyed being able to battle and catch Deoxys rather than just being gifted one directly.

Next up is Mew. The Old Sea Map - the Mew-equivalent in-game item to the Aurora Ticket was something that was only ever released in Japan and unfortunately there is no ROM that has been discovered for this yet. However, I’m not too sad as there was also a direct distribution of Mew where you were gifted it directly - and the ROM for this has also been made available on digiex.

Getting directly the pokémon is slightly less cool, but at this point it is not a concern for me! I loaded up the ROM for the Mew distribution and attempted to send myself one. This actually took a couple of goes ot get right as it seems the GBA link cable I was using needed to be in a specific way round to distribute Mew - but once I fixed that, it worked like a charm. I’d finally done it!

Hoenn National Pokédex: Completed!

I quickly sent both Deoxys and Mew over to my final Emerald save file and my National Pokédex stats read 386 seen / 386 caught. With all the extra time I had spent in Emerald leveling up all the different evolutions, my total play time was up to a whopping 103 hours, 40 minutes! That isn’t even counting the additional 17 hours, 42 minutes that I spent on the US version, trying to get the glitch to work...

I am absolutely dreading what Generation 3 will have done to my graphs. But honestly? Worth it!