The spirit of MissingNo lives on
The glitches of Pokemon Scarlet & Violet fall into two distinct categories. On one hand, you have the silly bugs that blast you into space when you make a sandwich. On the other hand, Scarlet & Violet can reportedly delete your save file for committing the crime of purchasing their DLC. Thankfully, a solution is coming for one of the more serious issues in the latter category.
Announced via the official Japanese Pokemon Twitter account, a patch for Scarlet & Violet is scheduled to arrive in April. While we don’t know the full context of this patch, we do know it will address an issue affecting the Walking Wake and Iron Leaves event. If players engaged in these battles without updating their game first, they would catch a bad egg in the end instead of one of the new Paradox Pokemon. A bad egg is a term for a corrupted monster that the game can’t recognize as an actual Pokemon, thus appearing as an unusable egg. This is essentially an evolution of the MissingNo phenomenon of Generation 1, so why wouldn’t Scarlet & Violet feature some form of this error?
Two things make the Bad Egg especially nasty in the newest Pokemon games. First, the egg is impossible to release and permanently takes up a slot in your storage. Second, obtaining one counts as your “catch” for either Walking Wake or Iron Leaves, locking you out of legitimately obtaining them. Fortunately, the event in question will repeat after the patch launches, and affected players will have their catch count reset. In other words, anyone with a bad egg will get another chance to grab either beast.
A decent enough fix
It would be nice if bad eggs were automatically replaced with their respective creatures. That said, I won’t object to players getting more opportunities to snag these exclusive Pokemon. More details about both the update and the raid challenge will be revealed as their respective launches draw nearer.
In the meantime, if you want to participate in any of the newest Pokemon games’ events, check for updates first. One would hope this issue won’t repeat. Yet given the state of the game, I’d err on the side of caution. Until someone can confirm a glitch like this can give me &4 Master Balls, it’s not worth the risk.
