Hey everyone! I, embarrassingly, made an error in this video (thanks to ndm13 for leaving a comment informing me of my mistake). This glitch does NOT occur in XD, but DOES occur in Colosseum. The mistake I made was setting Twineedle's secondary effect chance to 100, which I did to test out the timing of secondary effects with multi hit moves, but then I never set the effect chance to 0 to test out if the glitch occurs for realsies. My apologies for this oversight on my part. Hopefully you still enjoy the video regardless.

As soon as you mentioned the random numbers of 0-99, I immediately thought. "Oh god, this is going to be another gen 1 accuracy glitch."

This is like those playground rumors of Splash having a miniscule chance to do something cool, except it's actually real.

the only reason we know of that first person that found that glich is because he wasnt using an unsearcheable private community like discord. Anything put into discord if not saved dies with it. its very different from using a forum where even if the forum dies web scrapers and many different backup projects keep the information alive. thanks for this video and for saving a piece of information. and if you read thing comment, plz remember to not use discord as a wiki or forum, discord is where communities go to die

In Pokemon Diamond and Pearl, Hypnosis had a 70% accuracy, and was changed back to 60% Platinum onwards. In link battles if a DP copy battled a Platinum one, it would "pull" the code from Platinum and make Hypnosis hit its regular 60%.

The 1/256 miss keeps haunting Pokemon games, in different forms. First it was discovered that accuracy check is a "lesser or equal", so if it hits maximum, any move that doesn't completely ignore the check will miss (which Stadium "fixed" by making it do that check again if it rolls max). Then it was discovered that the secondary effect check suffers from the same problem in G2, where things like DynamicPunch inflict status 99.6% of the time (and Werster has seen Zap Cannon not paralyze in Stadium 2, so that's there too). And now, this fucking Ability related thing transferring the secondary effect, though this time it's a 1/100. It's like it does not want to leave.

To this day, nearly 20 yrs later, I swore that double kick once hit three times when I was fighting Roxanne in Pokemon Emerald.

At a guess, I'm assuming that XD uses Colosseum's code rather than Emerald's. Also, it really makes you wonder how much earlier this glitch would've been discovered if GameFAQs users weren't being GameFAQs users.

What in the playground rumour spaghetti code hell? I don't even blame the devs for not catching that (pre-Emerald). Abilities were completely new by that point, so such a peculiar and niche interaction was bound to slip through the cracks lol

So, if I'm understanding the technical details here properly... the root cause of this glitch is the exact inverse of the root cause of the famous "Gen 1 miss". (The Gen 1 miss happens because a check that should have been "less than or equal" is instead a "less than", whereas in this case, a check that should have been "less than" is instead "less than or equal".) Pretty wild that they would make that same type of mistake twice. Of course, in this case, the conditions in which this glitch would occur are so specific and unlikely that it's even easier to believe that it wouldn't get caught in testing.

You have no clue how shocked I was when it was revealed this issue is caused by the same kind of operator coding error that gen 1 missing has.

I love that new glitches are still being found in these games. They truly are coded.

I always find it super fascinating whenever the older Pokémon games have new glitches, exploits, and programming quirks uncovered years later. Great video, I learned something new!

This is really weird. Double Kick was my most used move in Sapphire as a kid and I can't remember a single instance of this happening. My Blaziken would always use this against almost everything.

Regarding the status condition messages: Each status condition effect has one of two messages it can display: One for when it is inflicted by a move, and one for when it is inflicted by an Ability. The move text is the generic "[SUBJECT POKEMON] is paralyzed! It may be unable to move!" that you see in most of the cases. The Ability text is "[ACTIVE POKEMON]'s [ACTIVE POKEMON ABILITY] paralyzed [SUBJECT POKEMON]! It may be unable to move!" When a Pokémon's Static/etc. ability activates, the flag MOVE_EFFECT_AFFECTS_USER in the MOVE_EFFECT_BYTE is set to TRUE, so that that effect will apply to the user of the current move (instead of the target). When this flag is read, it swaps which Pokémon are considered the active and subject for the next effect resolution, then immediately resets the flag (making it FALSE). Notably, this does not apply to other changes to the MOVE_EFFECT_BYTE, like adding MOVE_EFFECT_PARALYSIS to it. So when the multi-hit move hits a second time, the flag MOVE_EFFECT_PARALYSIS is still present but MOVE_EFFECT_AFFECTS_USER is now FALSE, so it's now a move that can paralyze its target (which is why the Pokémon with Static/etc. ends up paralyzed). And since the active Pokémon is now the move's user and the target Pokémon is the move's target, when filling it the text template for an Ability inflicting a status condition, it is assumed that it is the move's user and its Ability that inflicted the status condition, which is why you get that odd-looking text. The tricky part is how the game determines which message of the two types (move text or Ability text) to display. This seems to depend on a flag that the disassembly calls HITMARKER_IGNORE_SAFEGUARD (although IMO this is a bit of a misnomer - in general, it's used to check whether an effect is coming from a status-inflicting Ability, including for Shield Dust too). I tried looking into when this flag is reset, but I wasn't able to work out why there would be a difference in which message gets displayed. (Potentially it's related to whether the status condition is inflicted during the resolution of a single hit vs the resolution of the entire move, but I wouldn't expect the Ability text to display after the number of hits like it does on Chickasaurus's video in that case.) I've used Static and Paralysis in all my descriptions here for simplicity, but the same applies to Poison Point, Flame Body, and Effect Spore (although Effect Spore is locked into which status condition it chooses the first time).

So what you're saying is; they made the same mistake as they did with gen 1 with accuracy checks, but in a more exetreme nonsencial way. True Gamefreak coding.

You don't actually need to check for desyncs using this glitch, if it is possible to cause desyncs then every status move in the game has a 1% chance to cause a desync since the bugged effect chance check means that every status inflicting move in Ruby & Sapphire has a 1% higher than expected chance to cause said status. That seems like it would be a very, very high chance over the course of a battle and would happen all the time, so I would pretty strongly suspect that it isn't actually a problem.

Incredible that the Pokémon company managed to make the 1/256 glitch a second time.

Ty for explaining everything that happened. I was astonished by that glitch. I had more than 4k speedruns attempts and never saw a single shiny Mon, but that glitch happened... Well... Its what it's! Great video Yuki!

Not sure about your C/XD findings: isn't the glitch an issue with handling 0% chances, which was fixed in Emerald? If so, doesn't setting the chance to 100% bypass the glitch condition? It'd be like fixing the shore tiles on Cinnabar in gen1 and complaining that the old man glitch is still active if you force an encounter without clearing wild data. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding... Anyway, good video! I actually found your channel from your comment on Evie's video!

That's how poison point should work anyways. not just when the pokemon is attacked because the point is there whether the pokemon is being attacked or not. Like it makes more sense for the point to be used offensively as well as defensively.

I should stop being suprised by people finding new things in old pokemon games, but I know i won't any time soon.

This same thing mustve happened to me as well, as gen 3 were the only games I had access to as a child. I distinctly remember thinking Double Kick could cause paralysis for several years, confused why it would never activate again. Really interesting stuff!

Loved this video, the glitch itself was really fun to learn about and the extensive testing with other moves and games was great to see too, I adore weird lil quirks like this in these games

Polite Hoppip here! I remember scouring the ancient runes (GameFAQ page) trying to figure out this silly little glitch. Cool video!

Super interesting glitch! As for incorrect abilty text, I've seen this sort of bug all the time when making rom hacks It boils down too there being variables for the most recently activated ability and battler; so it's likey a timing issue based around to opposing mon activating/checking some behaviour You'd have to obv debug the exact condition to find out what is activating it

Well, your creativity and dedication to glitch hunting has me beat! I'm definitely not convinced that this glitch would occur during a link battle between RSFRLG and Emerald. Although that might depend on the scope as to how much Emerald actually governs in a link battle. If it determines ability effects as well, then we'd have our answer.

I just love mental image of Mudkip having Arm Thrust as starting attack, with those tiny little legs to pull it off

This was an interesting video, I appreciate how in-depth you went with testing, even getting the spinoff games.

the fact that the number checks for equal to or lesser than reminds me of the gen one miss glitch. you'd think they'd have learned their lesson form that

I never thought it would happen in Colosseum, even if it was fixed for XD, this is amazing lol For the name of the ability being displayed thing, I already talked about this on the discord but basically my theory is that if the ability triggers multiple times in different hits, it will only display the name of the ability the first time and all the other times will just say you were paralyzed/burned/poisoned This is normally impossible to notice because if you already have a status the game won’t display text if the ability triggers again. Maybe with status cancellation berries this could be tested? Like you get paralyzed, the berry activates and you get paralyzed again? I’m not sure if the berry would wait for the end of the move to activate but I have a feeling that it unfortunately would.

Young me definately did this and had no clue it wasn't a feature. I think on a Spore Shroomish. I'm sure most of us that chose Torchic and spammed Double Kick saw this glitch and didn't even register it in our minds, as abilities were new we were more or less blindly groping around on their effects.

Hey Yuki! Thanks for investigating this further! I’m like 99% sure the weird text is displayed when the opponent is the one using the multi-hit move rather than the player. In hindsight, I'm not really surprised that it doesn't cause a desync - because if what I'm thinking is the case, it would probably have a 1% chance to desync with any move at all, so we would know about it by now lol. What I'm wondering now is if the chance of *all* secondary effects triggering is 1% higher than intended in R/S/FR/LG/C? It probably would be, right?

This video is fantastic, its a super interesting subject & you presented it very well & did your own research.

Great to see Chikasauris getting her due recognition for her numerous contributions to glitch documentation in the franchise. Well done explaining this glitch and compiling the research! It thrills me to no end seeing new glitches get rediscovered and deep dived in the modern age

The part where it mixes up what ability us supposed to be doing what kinda reminds me of the Acid Rain glitch, and how that can have some odd messages concerning abilities.

i love that you found an old gamefaqs thread on this subject. i was all over those boards in the ruby/saphire days. i hate reddit and miss real forums

The validation that poster from gamefaqs is feeling after it building up for 15 years must feel great

So to generalize that code error, if the status chance is any number less than 100, the actual chance of it being inflicted is 1% higher. 0% becomes 1% and 99% becomes 100%.

3 whole generations of Game Freak not knowing the difference between "less than" and "less than or equal to". Amazing

This is a cool video! I don’t watch many KZfaqrs who do glitch hunting, so I’ll be excited to see more of it!

This mistake that makes 0% chance possible to activate is the _exact same_ mistake that caused the 1/256 glitch in gen1.

Shoutouts to the Glitch City glitchhunters for how good they are at what they do. It's not like they've been trying to recreate this glitch for 20 years. It just hasn't been documented for 20 years but like the moment it did they solved it almost immediately. POG people.

So, I haven't looked into the code so I'm probably missing stuff, but what I noticed about the times the text popped up is that the pokemon triggering the glitch had an ability that could also trigger it. What might be going on is that the new 'extra' condition that double kick gives retains some attribute of, "Inflicted by opponent's ability", so when the Double-kick user has Poison Point, that allows it to match up to this property, so it sees that say Nidoking has an ability that adds a secondary effect, and that say Raichu was hit by a status inflicted by a secondary effect generated by an ability, but if the user pokemon lacks one of these abilities it skips some kind of check or falsely assumes that it must just be a natural part of Double-kick, thus no text. Also, For the desync with emerald something I noticed is that the Emerald pokemon game was the host. This actually changes a lot of things about the battle as back then basically the host is registered as the 'player' so is kinda given a lot of advantages that the player subtly has over NPCs that's not much talked about (such as if you throw two pokemon with weather setting abilities on the field at the same time, the order of abilities is not determined by the pokemon's speed but rather who is the host and who isn't). If you ever want to try the desync again you should try the other game hosting the battle and see if this causes both games to play by the rules of the new host (thus this glitch is possible but doesn't cause a desync) or if Emerald still runs it's own base code even though the host has different code (thus the glitch only happens on one end causing a desync) Edit: Also it was very neat to see that not only can effect spore sleep activate the glitch, but it seems like out of all the possible status effects if you were guaranteed to get a sleep activation during a multi-hit attack, it's the most likely to hit both pokemon, since the example you showed only did '1-hit', meaning that since sleep ends the multi-hit move a sleep activation will *always* be on the final hit allowing it to fulfill two of the conditions (inflict a status effect and be the final hit of a multi-hit attack) in one go.

Imagine being vashperado, facing years of skepticism from practically everyone, even having some claim you were lying for attention...only to be vindicated a decade and a half later. I can’t think of an “I told you so” moment with more buildup.

i cannot believe they pulled a reverse gen 1 miss

Gen 3 games use will use emerald's engine if emerald is one of the games involved in the battle, same with gen 4 and Pt/HG/SS, the biggest difference I'm aware of there is the accuracy of hypnosis going from 70% to 60%.

Your right never heard of this but it also doesn't surprise me the games can be very broken if you know what your doing

15:30 the 2 instances where glitched ability text pop up both happened in FR/LG, while all of your tests took place in ruby alone

Ild like to assume that at least one of the double kicks like, got them so hard in the spine in paralysed that way

I've never heard of this before! Thanks for sharing, it's really interesting!

Great video! I love obscure glitches and I *LOVE* how in depth you went!

If Static causes paralysis -> display: [Pokemon A]'s [ability: Static] paralyzed foe [Pokemon B]. When Double Kick's secondary effect becomes Static's effect, maybe Double Kick picks up Static's text display trigger? -> [Charmander]'s [ability: Blaze] paralyzed foe [Squirtle]

So we got a 2nd 256 Glitch in Gen 3. Can't believe it came up twice. Great find

Great video. I appreciate both your research and your hands-on experimentation.

I bumped into this in FireRed earlier and someone linked me here. A Poliwag used Double Slap on my Parasect, activated Effect Spore on the first hit, and fell asleep. Then Parasect randomly fell asleep. It certainly caught me by surprise.

this is so weird I love it, there’s so many interesting things people are finding out recently in gen 3

Damn they really pulled the gen 1 miss glitch code and added it to this secondary affect glitch

so, is it a complete coincidence the gltich occured naturally for a nidoran line vs pikachu line twice?

12:05 Today I learned Seadra has Poison Point for whatever reason :p

I can't believe this was another case of using

It was a Brazilian streamer who caught this glitch live!

It at least looked like both of the examples you showed for the strange "Paralyzed by [Ability]" text were from FRLG, instead of Ruby or Sapphire. All of the testing that you mentioned doing in the video was on Ruby - have you done any testing with the glitch on FRLG? It could be another small difference between the game versions.

Having just found your channel like a month ago, im consistently shocked by the amazing quality

Hey, your video is amazing, really love how indepth it is, just wanted to tell that..the interaction reminder is nice and all, but it really takes you out of it? I'm enjoying listening to your explanation whilst I am doing something else and having the loud ding of it can be distracting and made me lose focus on what you were saying at the time. It's free to still have it, but I'd recommend having it be muted so it's only a visual reminder and allows people who are only activly listening to not be distracted. Outside of that : the video is amazing and I was suprised you weren't a big youtuber, instantly subscribed to you and I hope to see more of your content !

This explains why I thought weird things as a kid 😂 Like kicking= paralyzing Makes sense why i was confused about this, my first games were all of gen 3 and remakes. Then gen 2. Someone tell me why i swear I used an action replay as a kid and got Manaphy in Emerald?

when i was young i had a cd rom with the first 2 gen games on it, they were a glitchy mess for some reason, even more than the original games, in red i evolved a nidoran to nidorino with a moon stone and in silver the guy that trades you an onix for a bellsprout couldn't be spoken to because he was violently spinning in place

one glitch that was odd to me that occured was in gen 1 when i had a wild encounter and it rendered a starter.

Ooooo this is interesting! I like learning about new glitches.

Actually kind of a crazy glitch

I'm not the only one noticing that the glitched ability text was only happening in FRLG gameplay and not RS gameplay, right?

I vaguely recall reading somewhere ages ago that link battles in pokemon games generally defer to the rules of the "newest" cart based on some internal version number, not just between the different flavours in a generation, but also reginal versioning and revisions are taken into account, at least through gen 3 and probably the DS games? Probably by the switch games i assume you just have to be "up to date" to connect to anyone in the first place

You know what's hilarious about this? GF made the same "less than or equal to" mistake in Gen 1 and it's the cause of the infamous "Gen 1 miss." I guess old programming habits die hard.

Got a good feeling that whatever caused the weird Ability text to erroneously display that an ability had applied the wrong status is something unique to FR LG

as a crappy coder myself ive also been foiled by less than or equal to

1:55 I am shocked at how nostalgic the word 'siggy' makes me feel omg

On several occasions have seen the master ball fail after being thrown. After decades of gaming ens 1-5 have only seen it happen 3 times.

I recall once flinching with... Either Faint Attack or Crunch in the Battle Dome in Emerald. Think Infinite Accuracy/Stat Drop moves may also have this oddity and inherited the chance somehow, that secondary status has its own version of the glitch, or did I just get hit with a random bug (that Flygon I used kept having weird crap happen to her, so I wouldn't be surprised if my save on Emerald just had some weird fault in its code from messing with it prior)?

I have a very strange glitch that happened to me in one of the RBY games. It happened when I was little and no one has ever been able to explain it. In either red/blue or yellow version (I forget but the more I think back the more I think it was yellow) I was in the bushes on route 4 after you jump the point of no return ledge. I encountered a wild sandshrew that used struggle as its first and only move. At that point I had never seen the move struggle before and wanted to catch it. Sadly it fainted to self recoil damage. I remember this event because I then spent the next four hours trying to find another sandshrew that knew struggle. Now that im older and remember this, I know that its very strange since non player pokemon don't have PP in gen 1. Before anyone asks: I'm not misremembering it as GSC. I had just come from mount moon with low level pokemon. I was heading toward Misty. Additionally I got GSC with a gameboy color and this glitch happened to me on the original game brick. I've been pondering this for awhile and I'm guessing its either a hardware glitch or spaghet code sorcery. Some sort of weird sequence of shenanigans that caused some sort of memory mixup. Or maybe both! I don't know. My theory is that the sandshrew spawned with zero moves or only glitch moves. As struggle was the ONLY move it used from the start of the battle. Unfortunately I don't know how RBY's code works well enough to do more than wildly speculate. I figured a weird obscure glitch video was a good place to share this experience. I've never seen anyone else with the experience online so I figure I would bring it up if someone smarter than me found it interesting.

I just can't seem to wrap my brain around the explanation at 07:03 about how an ability such as Static functions. I mean, obviously it's correct because, y'know, the whole video demonstrates it, but when I try to walk through it in my head, it just doesn't make sense to me. So from what I can understand, let's say we're looking at the original Nidoking vs Raichu fight. Nidoking uses Double Kick, and it triggers Static. Instead of the simple method of, "Static activated, so paralyze the other pokemon", it adds a secondary effect to the move Nidoking used that makes it apply paralysis to the user of the move. So Nidoking is technically paralyzing *itself* with its attack. Normally this effect is then removed before the next attack. But since Double Kick is a multi-hit move, which for some reason checks for effects AFTER the ability activates, meaning the game will then see this secondary effect on Double Kick and apply it (with a 1% chance due to the same oversight that causes the Gen 1 miss). My confusion is, if the secondary effect is to apply status to the *attacker*, why does this end up affecting the *target*? Furthermore, aren't the "ability" and "secondary effect" the same thing? Since the secondary effect is just the method the ability uses to apply the status, shouldn't this just result in the move just trying to paralyze you twice, which effectively does nothing? The only explanation I can think of is that I'm misunderstanding how Static applies the secondary effect and how the secondary effect functions. My initial assumption is that Static gives the move a secondary effect that just paralyzes the user. But is it actually that Static first gives the move the secondary effect of paralysis (the exact same effect as any other paralyzing move), and *then* causes that effect to target the user instead of its target? So then due to the fact that the secondary effect check happens after the ability for multi-hit moves as opposed to before, the game rolls to see if Static activates (30% chance), and when it does, gives Double Kick the paralysis secondary effect, then causes this effect to target Nidoking instead of Raichu, and THEN sees Double Kick has the paralysis secondary effect, checks to see if it hits (1% chance due to

i cant believe 2 gens in this series, somehow, managed to have the same coding error, resulting in a 1/256 glitch. Or 1/100 in this case.

20:06 did the extra status text (e.g. “Poison Point did a Paralysis”), only appear in FR/LG? It seems like that’s the footage I’m seeing, whereas you tested in Ruby/Sapphire? Maybe something different between the games

I can’t believe Gen 3 has its own equivalent of the 1/256 glitch from Gen 1.

So they did a "Gen 1 miss" code again. These people never learn.

There are only two hard problems in programming: naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors.

Now we wait for this glitch to completely shake up the competitive scene of an obscute tier on showdown.

Something thats confusing me, maybe you can explain, is WHY the move gains the ability’s effect. Like, why is it programmed that way? What purpose does that serve in regular, non glitchy gameplay?

oh my god its literally the 1/256 miss glitch from gen 1. except way weirder and messed up. this is incredible i love this glitch so much

Very cool, thank you for your research and dedication

My guess as to why the glitchy messages show up is that the game recognizes the status trigger is an ability, but since the one afflicting it is the pokemon with a multi-hit move the game just assumes that pokemon has a status afflicting ability and as such, displays it. As to why it didnt show up during your testing, i think it might be because it's a frlg thing. both of the screenshots where it happens appear to be kanto games, so it's possible frlg are coded slightly differently, and we can't really test if emerald has this problem without removing the [if x > 0] fix. it is probably possible if we make this change tho.

GOD ok so one time years and years ago while i was playing firered i remember battling a less on the route east of cerulean, pikachu vs spearow, and i swear while it was using fury attack on me it procced statis and then i saw my pikachu ALSO get paralyzed with the prompt "spearow's keen eye paralyzed pikachu!" i felt like i was insane for years but now this video confirms it's a real glitch. thank god

The glitched ability activation text being displayed actually makes quite a bit of sense, if you think about it from a logic/programming standpoint, and take all the information in the video into account. 1. You only see the glitched text in the Gen 1 remakes. (From what you showed in the video, anyways.) This implies that the remakes probably use slightly different code for displaying ability activation text. * This is corroborated by the fact that the text is shown for both battlers in the remakes, rather than just for the Pokemon that took damage in other games. It's probably shown by an explicit call by the *move* during secondary effect activation, rather than the ability doing it as part of activation. 2. The text used for Poison Point (et. al) activating probably has hard-coded placeholders that get replaced with several variables, *in a context relative to the Pokemon that suffered a status effect* - not the Pokemon with the ability. (Something like "'s ! ") Putting those two together, it makes sense that the remakes are slightly different. For some examples: Charmander uses Double Kick on a Pikachu. The following texts are displayed: 1. PIKACHU's STATIC paralyzed CHARMANDER! It may be unable to move! 2. CHARMANDER's BLAZE paralyzed PIKACHU! It may be unable to move! Bulbasaur uses Double Kick on a Seadra. The following texts are displayed: 1. SEADRA's POISON POINT poisoned BULBASAUR! 2. BULBASAUR's OVERGROWTH poisoned SEADRA! Hopefully that makes sense. I could also look at the code if people are super curious about it, but I'm fairly confident that's why.

When the two results were .25% and .8% I was like “that’s just the chance of static happening twice,” which it kinda was.

You've heard of the gen 1 miss, now get ready for... The gen 3 hit!

You can't just start by saying we're going back 15 years to 2008 so casually like that

16:37 An ability that would but the user and opponent in a mutual sleep would be interesting. Or a trick nap.

It seems like they were trying to describe something about reality with the way they programmed static - "Pikachu was filled with static, so *when you made contact,* you became paralyzed."

This definitely happened to me before! It was weird and it didn’t make sense to my younger self!

20:00 Is that a difference caused by Ruby/Sapphire and FireRed/LeafGreen being different games? I never heard you specify whether you'd tested this in both pairs of games or not, but the pictures/clips you showed of the 'text glitch' all used Gen 1 Pokemon, and I don't _THINK_ I heard you say that you'd tested FireRed/LeafGreen, only Ruby/Sapphire...

I just experience a glitch in Pokemon shield. I am in the battle towers and I went against a trainer one of there Pokemon was a Snorlax with heat crash I dynamaxed my seelasteela and then the opposing Snorlax tried to use heat crash and I read the text say "Snorlax tried to use heat crash but it is a move that it can't use" happened 2 times 2 turns in a row while my seelasteela was dynamaxed then it used yawn my seelasteela returned to normal form and then when the Snorlax tried to use heat crash it worked without problem, it was such a weird thing to happen never seen anything like this ik the Battle tower