The various pokémon projects I've been doing these last few months (full origin dex, shiny hunting, rng manips, etc) all started when I got the code for Shiny Koraidon and used Pokémon Home for the first time.
Fast forward a few months, and after getting all my shiny mons from Emerald, I tried to send them to Home. However, I immediately noticed an issue: all my mons kept their full uppercase name, and also their name didn't change after evolving them. So I had a Milotic named FEEBAS which is absolutely unacceptable.
Fortunately, I had made a backup of my Emerald save with all the shinies just in case something went wrong.
So I investigated what happened and found the issue. In gen 3, the pokémon data doesn't have a flag for when a nickname is changed, instead it just compares its current name with the species name. This is usually not an issue, BUT apparently, games in different languages use different characters for the same letters.
In order to send pokémon to gens 4+, I had to first transfer them from my English Emerald to my Spanish Sapphire cartridge, because the only gen 4 cart I have is a Spanish Pearl, and PAL Park can only be used between games of the same language.
The issue then is that gen 4 games add a flag for when the pokémon is nicknamed. And since when doing the transfer to PAL park it was using spanish characters and transfering english mons, all of them got flagged as being nicknamed.
This meant that from then on, their name would never change, nor would I be able to change it in any future game.
I tried to think of ways to "trick" PAL park and make it think the mon wasn't nicknamed, but I couldn't find anything. So I was kinda stuck, and I even considered buying an R4 NDS cart to pirate the gen 4 games in the DS lite only because of this.
Turns out that the older gens 3-5 games don't have any checks for nicknames, so you can put whatever you want. However, after that, you have to transfer them to Bank, a cloud service. At that moment, Nintendo runs a check for swear words in the mons nickname. And if it detects one, it will just completely remove the name and leave the pokémon with the species name!!
So! I grabbed one of my shinies back in Emerald, and nicknamed it "FUCK PUTA", a name that would surely be flagged as offensive both in English and Spanish. I tried to send it up to Home, and.....
IT WORKED!! The mon kept its nickname up to gen 5, but then in the Poke Transporter I got a message saying that its nickname would be reset. After that, I sent it to Home, and even evolved it, and everything was working perfectly!
I felt like I had the biggest brain on earth at that point, I was so happy!
So! I had a solution! The issue now is that I needed to do this for 80 mons, and renaming all of them is quite tedious. So I looked up lists of censored words and tried to find the fastest name in the gen 3 keyboard (which is not QWERTY btw). In the end I figured that "ASS" was the best one, requiring only two different letters, one of which is where the cursor starts.
So that's what I did. I genuinely brought all my shinies to the name rater and changed their nickname to "ASS", which is hilarious. Then, I repeated the process of transfering them to Home, and it fucking worked!! (sorry for swearing, but it's on theme)
I can't believe I was able to use nintendo's puritanism to my advantage but hey, I'll take it! Now I have all my shinies in Home without any nicknames and I can name them whatever I want in the future!! Absolute resounding success
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