Pal Park name encoding glitch

The Pal Park nickname glitch is a glitch that exists in foreign versions of Pokémon that causes OT names or nicknames to become corrupted if they contain characters not in the English language.

Explanation

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").

List of problematic default trainer names

Note: This list is incomplete.

Spanish

Ruby/Sapphire

[TODO: Work on this.]

FireRed/LeafGreen

Character	Name
Red	Álvaro
	Llamín
Leaf	María

Emerald

[TODO: Work on this.]

List of problematic in-game trainers

Note: This list is incomplete.

Spanish

Ruby/Sapphire

[TODO: Work on this.]

FireRed/LeafGreen

[TODO: Look for FireRed-exclusive Pokémon.]

Location	Pokémon	Trainer	Nickname	Glitched name in Pal Park	Notes
Route 2	Mr. Mime	RÚTEO	MIMI	RつTEO
Route 5	Nidoran♂	QUICA	NIDRÁN	NIDRいN	Only in LeafGreen
Cinnabar Island	Seel	GOYO	SEELÍN	SEELコN

Emerald

None.