When I last wrote I told you how despite the complaints from people about Gen 8 making it that you couldn’t use the increasingly large amount of Pokémon, in reality it was impossible since the very inception of the franchise. I talked about Mew, its history and how the 151st Pokémon was never made properly available. But Mew was ultimately a last minute addition created thanks to spare space. Everything to come has no excuse.

The buzz and excitement for the Second Generation was huge. Pokémon had become a world phenomenon already. Other companies were all in a rush to release their own entry from Japan to get a slice of that pie. But Pokémon had one ace up its sleeve. The very first episode of the anime, an anime based on a game, ended with the appearance of something that wasn’t in the game. As the animated adaption of the First Generation continued more Pokémon that were not in the original Pokedex started to be shown, and with the first movie the one about Mewtwo and Mew contained more, the same with the in between series.

Before the dawn of the new Millennium they were released in Japan. Pokémon Gold and Silver for the Gameboy colour. But I’m not here to talk about that, this is not a review. Gold and Silver came out with 100 brand new Pokémon in the game. But two questions rose in my mind. What about Mew? and is there another Mew equivalent?

So first up, which would cement that ‘got to catch them all’ is truly un unobtainable goal. Mew was not obtainable. While it was understandable that certain iconic Pokémon could only be obtained through trading over from the Gen 1 games. Mew being in that list meant that it was truly an impossible task, a lottery to achieve if it was possible, in more than one way.

The second question is indeed the 100th new Pokémon, in the dex after Lugia and Ho’oh was Celebi. Like Mew this Pokémon had base stats of 100 in everything but its typing was Grass/Psychic rather than pure Psychic like Mew. It however lacked Mew’s trait of being able to learn any TM. Celebi was officially revealed in July 2000. This means it was known to the world officially before the game was out in other regions and over a full year before its release in Europe.

There was a fair build up for Celebi too. In game in the location Ilex Forest there is a shrine and talk of the forest Guardian, so similar to Mew there were hints in game to its existence. However the largest tease to it was coming from the anime. Following the Pokémon League, Ash went to a series of islands on a mission to pick up a strange Pokémon ball-like object called the GS ball. This ball was to have contained Celebi and was a central point of Pokémon lore, it was why he went to the islands and why he went to the Johto region… and then… suddenly it was left at Kurt and never mentioned again.

The GS ball is infamous because of this, the grand example of a plot thread completely dropped despite it being a central point of the story. This was done as rather than have the GS ball story in the anime lead to Celebi as was planned. The higher ups decided to make Celebi a central point in the anime’s 4th movie, which would also then tie into its release through… yet again… events. They didn’t even use or reference the GS ball in the movie which would have been an easy way of salvaging that plot. A central point of the anime’s story was abandoned and left to hopefully be forgotten, for the sake of a movie. I have since called when this happens ‘GS balling‘.

There is a twist in this tale however. For while in Gold and Silver Celebi could not be obtained in game, in its third version Crystal you could activate an event to encounter and catch the Mythical Pokémon. This was done by Obtaining the GS ball as a node to the anime’s original plan. But now the knife is twisted once again. You may guess the first issue – the GS ball was distributed and not found in game. But the second part is the start of a whole new problem with Pokémon not normally obtained in game, to get the GS ball required something never released outside of Japan. When Crystal came out the event was still programmed into the game to the point of it being translated, but there was no way to activate it because Mobile game adapter was never released outside Japan and no alternative method to get it was programmed in. It’s worth noting Celebi would go on to be the least distributed Pokémon in Europe. While Mew and others would see more widened release, Celebi was only released twice until an online distribution in Gen 6, 15 years later.

With Mew not obtainable in Gen 2 and thus locked to events in Gen 1 and now a second Pokémon Celebi also only distributed through events and thus not obtainable in game, despite the “gotta catch em all” tag used, no matter how hard we tried, we never would get them. New precedents were now made and for the worst. Mythicals were being tied to movie releases, even if in-game events were programmed into the game, those too were locked and finally some of those events would never make it out of Japan. These problems will become exacerbated and expanded as we move further forward.