Pal Park name encoding glitch: Difference between revisions

In Generation III games, when the player gives the trainer a name, or gives a Pokémon a nickname, the character set is restricted to English letters, as well as numbers and some symbols; that is, no characters unique to other languages (such as Spanish) can be used, regardless of the language of the game. (In Generations I and II, this was also true to prevent glitches, and in English versions of Generation IV, this is also true for unknown reasons.) However, despite this, in non-English versions of Pokémon, there are a few default trainer names that have non-English characters, and there are some in-game trainers that trade with the player who have either OT names or nicknames with foreign characters. The programmers apparently forgot about this possibility when programming Pal Park: When any Pokémon with foreign characters in their nickname or OT name have foreign characters and are transferred to a Generation IV via Pal Park, they will not be converted properly and will corrupt, changing to random Japanese kana. For example, Á will become い (hiragana "i").