Glitch City Laboratories Archives

Glitch City Laboratories closed on 1 September 2020 (announcement). This is an archived copy of a thread from Glitch City Laboratories Forums.

You can join Glitch City Research Institute to ask questions or discuss current developments.

You may also download the archive of this forum in .tar.gz, .sql.gz, or .sqlite.gz formats.

Generation III Glitch Discussion

Mauville Bard "Celebi" glitch? - Page 1

Mauville Bard "Celebi" glitch?

Posted by: MillhioreF
Date: 2020-05-31 03:51:16
Hi everyone,

Can't find this documented anywhere on the internet so I figured I'd post here. Back in the day I recall using cheats to have all 386 Pokemon registered in the Pokedex, and at once point decided to mess around with the Bard NPC that some save files get in Mauville.
When trying to make him say "Celebi" the letters of the word came out extremely slowly (one letter per second or so) while a quiet, glitchy tone with some faint beeping played - once the word was over, the Bard continued as normal. It's a really small thing, but I want to make sure I'm both not misremembering and that it wasn't just my copy of the game with this strange effect.

If anyone could confirm the existence of this little curiosity, I'd appreciate it massively. Thanks in advance!

Re: Mauville Bard "Celebi" glitch?

Posted by: Deku-Kitty
Date: 2020-06-03 17:52:05
This interested me, so I did some testing. I can confirm this is indeed a repeatable glitch! It only appears to happen in the English versions of Ruby and Sapphire, as I tried a couple other languages as well as Emerald and he always spoke "Celebi" as intended. It seems like the English localization either forgot or incorrectly programmed the voice synthesis for that word. The interesting part is that the behavior is different depending on the revision. In version 1.0, it happens as you described. The word "Celebi" appears extremely slowly and lacks the voice. But in revisions 1.1 and 1.2 the word appears much faster than the other words, still lacking the voice to go with it.

Here's a video demonstrating this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiRiBjCMcYY

I couldn't find any documentation of this either, though that's not entirely surprising. In Gen 3 Celebi was only distributed through a few events, otherwise the only way to get it would be cheating. The Bard only has "Celebi" as an option if you have it registered in the Dex as seen or caught it. Also only trainers with an ID ending in 0 or 1, or trainers that mixed records with someone who had the Bard would get him. So only a tiny amount of players could even see this glitch. And considering how… forgettable the Mauville Old guys were, I doubt most people would have ever tried it. So… Thank you for remembering it!

Re: Mauville Bard "Celebi" glitch?

Posted by: MillhioreF
Date: 2020-06-04 01:31:50
Thank you so much for recording this! That's pretty much exactly how I remembered it, yup. The "super quiet glitchy tone" was probably just me having my ear too close to the console and hearing the machinery inside.  :-X

Glad to finally put this undocumented mystery to rest over a decade later!

Re: Mauville Bard "Celebi" glitch?

Posted by: OwnageMuch
Date: 2020-06-04 17:09:01
What an unusual glitch! Very interesting that it differs between game version. Does this not even happen in the 1.0 Japanese release?

Re: Mauville Bard "Celebi" glitch?

Posted by: Torchickens
Date: 2020-06-07 12:56:25
Nice glitch! ^^