Subject: I'd forgotten about the Johto Guard glitch.
Author:
Posted on: 2014-03-12 21:08:00 UTC
Before I start, you didn't do anything wrong, doctorlit. Missingno and 'M appear under the same conditions in the same location, and share the same sprite. You probably just found one when you were looking for the other.
While some of the other points people have been bringing up are very subjective(No, Huinesoron, I do not think that Missingno is more "adorable" than Rayquaza. I'd far prefer a tiny coily sky-snake to a skeletal eurypterid with horrific scythe-like arms that's prone to exploding with a hiss of static and Rhydon/Bulbasaur-noises into a mess of grayish bio-mist, thank you very much.), I actually like some of them, like how Missingno is, broadly speaking, a canonical mini, since its appearance in-game when the engine runs up against a hex code it doesn't recognize is similar to how minis are spawned when the Word World meets a name it doesn't recognize. Never mind that those problems would create the Bad Egg at any time from the Game Boy Color era onward, I suppose, because eggs are boring.
When you brought up the Missingno that could turn into a Stantler when traded to Gen II, though, I remembered the Johto Guard glitch. Basically, there are certain versions of Gold and Silver's Missingno-equivalent that can mask the presence of other glitches, causing the game to treat those glitches as Pokémon corresponding to their in-game hex code, which would always be a Pokémon with a higher Pokédex number than 151. These masked glitches would be treated as their non-Kanto counterparts by the other game, and would permanently take on the form of that counterpart when traded over. It goes the other way, too, so a non-Kanto Pokémon could be traded over after being masked and take the form of a glitch.
So, applying this to an in-universe perspective, when there are two or more minis around at the same time, some of them could potentially cause others to start looking like something else, but they would default back to their primary forms when brought into a new area, or alternatively, a mini-Missingno in its default form could turn into a new species entirely when brought into a new area, which could retroactively explain the mini-Deoxys as mini-Missingno that had been Johto Guard-reformatted, and explain those mini-Rayquaza as mini-Missingno that were masking one another for whatever reason. The forms of the mini-Rayquaza in the mission were shown to be mutable(one sprouted rabbit ears once its capitalization was changed), which might support the idea that the forms are just guises, and cause potential shenanigans for Agents who adopt multiple minis by having the mini-Missingno mask one another as Ursaring or Garbodor or something. It's almost like Phobos's idea, but instead of casting Rayquaza as some new form the Missingno take or as an evolution of the minis, it would just be a minor and in most cases temporary glitchy illusion ability.
It's not a great fit, but it is a retcon, after all. It's not going to be perfect. I just wanted to say this because, if we do decide to remove mini-Rayquaza from existence, it'd be nice to have a canonical explanation for what was going on. I wouldn't want to keep this to myself if it would end up affecting anything. I'm pro-continuity, after all, not pro-Rayquaza. It's just that up until now there was no way to reconcile pro-continuity with anything but pro-Rayquaza without breaking several rules.
If we do promote the mini-Missingnos to an in-mission presence, though, we'll need to ensure that they don't become too OP due to poor understanding of how they work. A well-written wiki page should help with that, but it's not going to stop everything.
Speaking of wiki pages, have you gotten the Undelete page that I mentioned here up and running yet? If you have, we should be able to mark certain pages for deletion, and then get rid of them without fear that doing so would make them unrecoverable.