Pal Park name encoding glitch

Miscellaneous glitches of Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, Pokémon Platinum, and Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver

Exclusive to Diamond and Pearl:
Battle Barry every day | Broken escalator glitch (Japanese only) | Choice Banded Pursuit glitch (Japanese only) | Choice Banded U-Turn glitch (Japanese only) | Dress up Hiker glitch | Egg determination glitch | Fake Tower Tycoon glitch | Honey/Sweet Scent shop glitch | Mute Route 214 glitch | Mute Sendoff Spring glitch | Protect oversight

Exclusive to Platinum:
Ace Trainer battle loop (Japanese only) | Giratina Origin Forme glitch | Trapping Ability flee glitch

Exclusive to HeartGold and SoulSilver:
Boulder push glitch | Water stream glitch | Floating walking Pokémon glitch (poison variation, menu variation) | Sequence breaking

In various or all entries:
Acid Rain glitch (Platinum/HeartGold/SoulSilver) | Grass glitch (Diamond/Pearl/Platinum) | Global Trade System glitches | Incorrect sprite for the Defog HM (Diamond/Pearl/Platinum) | Pal Park daily limit oversight | Pal Park nickname glitch | Route 224 tile oversight (Diamond/Pearl/Platinum) | VS Recorder audio glitch

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Reported by Blaziken257 Verified by Torchickens

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

Explanation and brief overview

As of Generation IV, almost every main series Pokémon game has been translated into other languages after the associated game's release in areas of the world other than Japan such as Europe and Korea although it has only been recently that Nintendo have encouraged and supported interaction between games of different languages most notably with the release of the Global Trading System and the ability to trade between different localizations of the same game without any harmful glitches.

In Generation I and Generation II, when the player gives the trainer a name, or gives a Pokémon a nickname, the character set is restricted to English letters or Japanese letters, depending on the localization of the game, as well a few symbols not including numbers; that is, no characters primarily used in other languages (such as Spanish) can be selected, regardless of the language of the game. The only characters which exist within the same character set are those which are used in the localized game and the leftover hiragana and katakana from the original Japanese version, however due to incompatibility between Pokémon games of different languages, glitches will persist (the extent to which depending on the localizations) most notably between English and Japanese versions if two players using different game localizations attempt to trade or battle with Pokémon. In these generations, although leftover hiragana and katakana remain within the game code, characters such as the uppercase 'Á' and 'É' do not exist within the English character set but only within the relevant game localizations (with the exception of the lowercase 'é') where these characters are primarily used within the game. If the equivalent character is recalled in another localization where it does not exist, the game will recall it as a 'symbol' incremental to that of the current tileset.

This problem was partly amended in the various different localizations of European Generation III games, where all standard European characters were implemented one primary character map even though some of these characters are not normally used in certain countries, such as the above mentioned 'Á' and 'É'. However, for unknown reasons only the localized characters and the leftover Japanese characters exist within the English versions of the Generation IV Pokémon games; as was the same case in the Generation I and Generation II games, hence if a Pokémon with an accented name is migrated to Generation IV the accent is 'translated' into an equivalent Japanese Katakana or Hiragana symbol.

Accented Pokémon names in Generation III

Unusually, characters with grave, acute and circumflex accents, as well as those with a diaeresis or tilde cannot be chosen when naming the player or nicknaming a Pokémon even within game localizations where they are commonly used. Instead, the player can only choose the characters that he or she would have been able to in the previous generations, with the addition of numbers 1-9 and a few symbols.

Despite this, in non-English European versions of the Generation III main-series Pokémon games, 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 game 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

This section is incomplete, please feel free to add any missing information about the subject. It is missing: {{{1}}}.

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.