Forgotten Dex – Among curiosities and secrets of the Pokémon world #3

Millenari, we are pleased to introduce you to our new column: Forgotten Dex – Among Curiosities and Secrets of the Pokémon world, where we will share many curiosities about the universe of pocket monsters. This product is the result of a collaboration with our colleagues at Pokéos, so, before we start, we invite you to visit their official website, a real goldmine for all fans.

Thanks to Pokéos and @FedeFadePSK, the initiative Forgotten Dex aims at bringing back into vogue the official (but forgotten) forms of many Pokémon using models similar to those of Pokémon HOME. Forgetti, a nice Rotom Pokédex (designed by @shellyeah_art) who loves to collect data on the curiosities of the Pokémon world, will be accompanying you through the Forgotten Dex.

In this third episode, Forgetti is ready to show us five new curiosities about the world of our favorite creatures: we are in your hands, Forgetti! Are you ready to discover the secrets of semi-official Pokémon?

The Glitch Pokémon: MissingNo.

We are playing Pokémon Red or Blue, we just talked with the old man in Viridian City who wants to teach us how to catch some Pokémon. Without moving from the spot, we immediately fly to Cinnabar Island to surf through its coast and find some Water Pokémon. However, something seems strange: a bunch of weird level-80 Golduck appear, blocking our path until we encounter MissingNo., wild Pokémon with a sprite completely made up of pixels. What is even stranger is that its type is Bird/Normal (not Flying!), and its level is 146. What in the world is happening?

In Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow, Pokémon were classified in two different ways. Besides the Pokédex number, there was a secret index number, useful to identify these creatures in the ROM of the game. Thus, each Pokémon had a Pokédex and an index number which, most of the time, did not correspond. Moreover, there is also another discrepancy: in the Kanto Pokédex we can see 151 Pokémon in total, whereas the secret index numbers of the first-generation games are 190. These 39 additional numbers correspond to numerous different kinds of MissingNo. (Missing Number).

Today, thanks to numerous interviews and analysis, we are sure that these additional 39 Pokémon were creatures that Game Freak decided to eliminate from the first generation in order to use them for the second. However, this exclusion was only partial: through numerous glitches, each of these 39 MissingNo. was encounterable in one of the five different sprites (one of them is identical to the ghost that we find in the Pokémon Tower in Lavender Town) that we present in this article. Which one is the most frightening for you? Is it the Kabutops fossil or the group of random pixels? Additional frightening element: in Pokémon Yellow, at the beginning of the battle against MissingNo., its cry, made of terrible metallic sounds, could last 12 minutes!

Think twice before reenacting one of the different glitches to encounter MissingNo. in your games! If, on the one hand, the complicated process allows you to obtain 128 copies of the sixth item in your bag; on the other hand, catching MissingNo. triggers various bugs in your save file, forcing you to delete this save file in order to resolve them.

Kumonsta

Do you believe that MissingNo. is the only mysterious and unidentified creature in the Pokémon world? Well, you are wrong! Episode number 138 of the animated Pokémon series, we are witnessing Ash’s travels through the Johto region, and our heroes stop for a second to watch a short movie. Here, we see a giant and mysterious Pokémon: it’s Kumonsta. This unofficial name refers to a huge spider, with eight legs and multiple eyes, and with black/yellow bee-like colors.

This creature has never been included in any Pokémon generation and, at the same time, cannot be found in any list of excluded or eliminated Pokémon, although it is clearly quite similar to Galvantula and Beedrill. Who knows, maybe this huge spider will be included in a future generation. Such a giant creature would surely be able to frighten every Pokémon Trainer. Aracnophobics: be aware!

Venustoise

For the next curiosity, we stay inside the anime world and in the context of non-official creatures. The episode is number 20, where our heroes meet a mischievous Gastly for the first time. Why mischievous? This Gastly can generate quite convincing illusions: initially, it imitates a human figure, generating the image of a young girl. Later, however, it also generates a curious figure of a particular Pokémon: Venustoise.

This is the first representation of a fusion between Pokémon: Venusaur and Blastoise are merged in order to create a frightful illusion. With a tortoise body and a giant iconic flower in the back, the Venustoise fusion illustrated by @FedeFadePSK realizes every Trainer’s dream. Do you think that Game Freak will implement Pokémon fusions in the future? Venustoise would surely be a powerful enemy!

Dark Matter

Another curiosity and another mysterious creature, never classified in any known Pokédex. This time we move from the anime world towards the spin-off series Pokémon Mystery Dungeon. More specifically, in Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon, published in 2016 for the Nintendo 3DS, the main villain is Dark Matter, a mysterious entity capable of absorbing the energy of those Pokémon that sense negative feelings, thereby transforming them into stone. Is Dark Matter a Pokémon or a sort of divine entity? Unfortunately, an answer has never been given…

Dark Matter is a fundamental character for the narrative of this title: it represents the incarnation of all the negative feelings that, periodically, torment all the creatures of the Pokémon world.

During the final battle of the game, once Dark Matter assumes its last form and, at the same time, is about to get defeated by the player, it reveals one of the deepest messages of the Pokémon videogame history: its defeat is only a small part of the life cycle of living beings since it is not definitive. In the distant future, Dark Matter will resurrect, and the people and Pokémon of the future will have to deal again with their negative emotions. Sufferance, therefore, cannot be eliminated and will periodically hit every living being. The lesson, here, is that we must always be able to fight against it, maybe with the help of our Pokémon friends!

TCG Pokémon: Robo Substitute

A tiny Robo Substitute allows us to tone down the topics. We deal now with the world of the Pokémon Trading Card Game and, more specifically, with the 2014 set XY – Phantom Forces, the fourth set for the sixth-generation era.

The card represents a classical subject of the Pokémon world, namely the doll that appears in the videogames when we use the move Substitute. The peculiarity of this card is that it represents the substitute in a mechanical form, a stylistic choice that has never been repeated in the Pokémon world.

Why such a choice? Because of the theme of this TCG set! Numerous cards that represent peculiar technological objects of Team Flare were included in XY – Phantom Forces. Small additional curiosity: besides the Team Flare symbol in the Robo Substitute’s belly, the small doll wears a pair of red glasses, a clear reference to Lysandre, the main villain of the game.

Well done, Forgetti! Now go and discover new curiosities for our fans. We are all waiting for the new episode to discover new forgotten secrets of the Pokémon world!