The Battle Tower Glitch That Makes You Lose

I encountered a glitch in Pokemon Platinum's Battle Tower which inadvertently led to solving a 15 year old mystery. It's extremely easy to accidentally activate this and lose your entire win streak while challenging the Battle Tower. In this video I go over what happened, how it was solved, and how you can prevent it from happening to yourself! I also explore if it happens in Diamond, Pearl, HeartGold, or SoulSilver.

Adding a detailed description that will hopefully show up if people try to search when it happens to them: This glitch shows up in the form of a black screen that stays up when you enter the battling room in the Battle Tower in Pokemon Platinum. You still hear beeps if you press A or B buttons, but the screen remains black until the graphics refresh like with opening the party menu. The music still plays, and you may think you need to restart your game but you do not.

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All footage captured on my Nintendo DS with authentic Pokemon Pearl, Platinum, and SoulSilver cartridges.

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RETIRE's YouTube: @RETIREglitch
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0:00 Intro
0:28 The Glitch
2:02 Theories and Research
4:30 Trying to Recreate the Glitch
6:07 Success!
7:16 Explanation
8:57 Conclusion

[Etch]

A few people have asked if holding B works / why would they make their debug functionality frame perfect, so to add some details: Holding B does not work, and we can only guess since there's no way to know for sure, but my guesses are:
1) When this was implemented they just didn't have the latter parts implemented and it looped there until the B press happened
2) They had multiple checks for B press initially but they all got deleted except this one.

RETIRE thinks 1 is likely, and I agree. But again impossible to say for sure.

Other than that I've been surprised by how many comments I've gotten from people who have also experienced this and had no idea what was happening. I'm very glad I was able to capture this on stream and investigate it to finally solve this for y'all! Hopefully nobody ever loses their streak to this again 🙂

[RETIREglitch]

I like that you included all the stupid theories we came up with before actually finding the bug in the code. Goes to show how often we just have to grasp at straws until we can recreate the issue to debug it.

This video also shows that there are a bunch of glitches a lot of researchers would never encounter, and wouldn't ve found unless someone casually comes across them. Researchers and testers focus on completely different areas of the code to break.

[testinhaa]

3:00 It's incredible how the forum commenters from 15 years ago and the reddit commenters of today are as useful as always!

[NinjasticFlare]

I hate the discordification of forums. When I found a forum for a niche topic, I felt like I struck gold. Being able to read old threads and search for them was so much easier. Discord communities just don’t feel the same, either.

[Trillyana]

"Hey win streak, how's it goin?"
"🅱"
"Understandable, have a great day"

[nazberry]

So uh, I did found a funny little glitch In Diamond/Pearl/Platinum recently and I can't really tell if it is well known or not.
The glitch can be done in the Pokemon team menu with the use of Softboiled/Milk Drink Outside of battle.
By using Milk Drink/Softboiled on an injured Pokemon It can be healed back by taking HP from the caster of the move.
You also cannot use it on a Pokemon at full HP or fainted.
However, you can select an injured mon and then, after pressing A, quickly press the d-pad (or 3ds analog stick when I discovered it)
to point towards another pokemon: that other pokemon gets healed instead.

This leads to 4 little things I noticed but perhaps more can be done...

1- You can "revive" a fainted pokemon that way (which should be impossible)
2- You can OVERHEAL a pokemon which will actually have HP above its max (So a shedinja with 100HP as the jankiest example i can think of)
3- Healing an Egg will overheal it too, and will show the HP bar of the actual pokemon to be hatched.
4- Trying to "heal" the Back button crashes the game.

I could not reproduce it on HGSS, though it might be possible there too.
I don't really know the true extend of this glitch but I'd say it's an interesting one.

[pastelpunk]

B to lose, L to taunt, F to pay respects.

[seki]

Sad that Discord being the main place where discoveries are presented and discussed makes it even harder to find stuff. Sad they've overtaken forums so thoroughly.

[Tomixk]

I'm glad people like you exist. The amount of information concentrated in hubs that are just a big hassle to search, like Discord servers, are us regressing into an era of information pre-wikis.
I love how the Pokémon Community in general creates videos documenting these small niche things.

[turingtestingmypatience]

Thank you so much for touching on Discordification. My thoughts on the matter are hazy, so I can't really express how much it means in a comment, but you explained my concerns with it perfectly. :]

[Evansfight]

etchy i love this theme of DM'ing people who made a post on some forum in the ballpark of 10 or more years ago

[drakath]

finally, a bug that WOULDN'T be replicated in BDSP.

[VinsCool]

When being impatient accidentally punishes players during boring win streak sessions... Very annoying indeed.
Moral of the story, do not press B in the Battle Tower!

[MajicMarco]

When you mentioned it happened when you spammed B and it only happened sometimes I was like, it must be frame perfect. Thats pretty funny. Very cool find in such an old game.

[delphoxhoopa]

This could not have come out at a more perfect time because I'm currently working on getting the Multi Ability Ribbon for my Infernape, so I know what to avoid now! This was a very educational video!

[Fiendoh]

you are making the history of gen 4 pokemon documentation

i always found gen 4 mechanics, bugs and quirks to be very poorly documented until very recently

hell, to this day, munchlax hunting is only ever vaguely explained by the most widespread internet sources

thanks to your effort we are seeing those bugs and "features" discovered and explained in a comprehensive way, truly a wonderful day to be a gen 4 fan!

[Klaxynd]

As someone who used to tap buttons to music a lot as a kid, I’m actually glad I had Pearl and not Platinum for once in my life.

…Though I still would like a legitimate copy of Platinum. 😂

[mercenaryforhire]

Ah yes, the multi ability ribbon... Reminds me of that time I lost the 50th battle in a row.

[theaveragesquire]

as someone who plays a lot of gen 2 pokémon on hardware, i have experienced so many weird glitches and never really found any explanation, even on niche discord servers, so its interesting to see someone addressing this, even if its in a different game.

[chocokittybo]

This sort of thing is actually why we've mostly trained ourself not to push any buttons when the game is loading. If a game is loading player inputs can do all sorts of weird unintended things, whether there's a code like this that does stuff or not