A legendary Pokémon glitch is back to wreaking havoc with Pokémon Bank update

Pokémon players can now transfer Pokémon from the series’ older Nintendo 3DS titles to Sun and Moon using Pokémon Bank — with some big exceptions. Several players report that an old, well-known glitch Pokémon leaves its mark when they attempt to bring it into Sun and Moon.

MissingNo. is a legendary programming error that first appeared in the Game Boy versions of Red and Blue. Although it’s not technically a Pokémon, the mess of scrambled graphics could be used in battles and occupy a space in a player’s party or storage box. Essentially, MissingNo. takes on many of the characteristics of a Pokémon without being one. Trying to catch the glitch could cause Pokémon Yellow to freeze, for example, as well as create other graphical glitches in Red and Blue.

Those who caught the glitch Pokémon in the Virtual Console re-releases of the original generation of Pokémon games attempted to bring MissingNo. over to Sun and Moon as soon as the Pokémon Bank update went live. It’s not surprising that the non-Pokémon won’t carry over, but the effect it has on other Pokémon the player does transfer over from the same storage box is pretty odd.

MissingNo. causes the other Pokémon in the Pokémon Bank transporter box to adopt weird new nicknames when they make it into Sun and Moon. The Pokémon appear to take the name of the one immediately next to it. In the image above, for example, Rhydon is renamed Tentacool, the Pokémon preceding it in the box.

The video below shows a player walking through the entire process to show the quirk in action.

Since nicknames cannot be changed after a Pokémon moves from one older game to another, a Pokémon affected by the MissingNo. glitch will have to live with that new, incorrect moniker for good. While some may be amused to own a Raichu named Hitmonlee, for others, the glitch isn’t worth the trouble. Instead, it’s a sign of MissingNo.’s latest strange effect on the Pokémon games.