My Pokepastas - 2019-2020

Empty Spaces (11/18/20)

Sometimes I wonder what's out there that we can't see. What sort of things pass us by that we fail to notice - or simply disregard as unimportant and forget without thinking. I wonder what it is we define ourselves by to prove that we exist.

But, sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm sure this will sound silly, but a few weeks ago, I had a bizarre experience with a Pokemon game, one I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

It began with me seeking to hack my Pokemon Y save. I know, I know - but I really wasn't doing anything harmful, I just wanted to give myself a few event Pokemon I'd have a hard time obtaining otherwise and perhaps boost the IVs of my existing team. I'd beaten the game a few times over, so maybe messing with my current save would add a bit more spice to this playthrough. Unfortunately, I hadn't thought to back up my original save before editing it...

I'd went to download PKHex, but the page I had got it from was... bizarre. I'd thought nothing of it then, as in the past I'd usually been fine just clicking the first link that cropped up in a cursory search, but now I realize it was a red flag. The page had been unusually simple - an all black background with white text, a big download link in the middle. "OFFICIAL PKHEX DOWN LOAD. OFFICIAL LINK HERE" was plastered all over the page. Incredibly unprofessional-looking, sure, but I'd seen near-equally amateurish official download pages for similar tools.

After scanning it for malware and finding none, I ran it, and used it as normal. There was only one abnormality that caught my eye - a single checkbox under the Trainer Info dialogue, already checked, labelled "Secret." It was greyed out and unclickable - whatever it was, I couldn't turn it off. But I disregarded it - maybe it was just some kind of oddly-labelled core game function? Though, admittedly, I wondered why it was in the editor at all...

I injected the edited save back into my game, and things began as normal... though, while it may have just been my imagination, it felt as though everything took far longer to load. But all my edits were in place, and the game seemed to work as normal otherwise, so I continued to play as I usually did, nearly forgetting completely about the PKHex oddities.

That was, until the unusual wild encounters began.

Walking through the flowers outside Snowbelle City, I encountered what looked like a Bulbasaur. That was strange enough, but it also was level 0, had an incorrect cry and its name was simply a number that I've forgotten by now. In my shock, I decided to at least catch it, to figure out what it was. Unfortunately, my attempt to weaken it made it faint instantly. I should have seen that coming, but either way I was left on the overworld confused and with no questions answered.

Afterwards, I did some research online to find out what that was. As it turned out, it seemed I had encountered one of the thousands of generation VI glitch Pokemon. Strange, usually 0-statted things that used the models of other - usually Bulbasaur - Pokemon, had numbers for names, and usually caused severe technical issues to keep in your party. So, perhaps, it was a good thing I didn't catch it, and I was lucky it hadn't crashed my game.

Though... I wasn't sure how or why I encountered it at all. I chalked it up to a side effect of the save editor - there was no other way to explain it, after all. Perhaps it was just a one-off glitch?

Of course, then, several normal encounters later in Victory Road, I ran into another glitch Pokemon... one that crashed my game on encounter.

I was understandably frustrated and kind of nervous. Something was wrong with my game. Anywhere, at any time, I could encounter one of the nearly sixty-five-thousand different glitch Pokemon, and many of them could crash my game - or possibly worse. After all, these things were incredibly poorly documented.