Ah, Celebi. Celebi is one of those special legendary event pokemon. It’s cute,  isn’t it? And of course, powerful. It’s a psychic/grass type, so it has about a billion weaknesses. Still, a smart player can work around those. Though the Japanese spelling of its name – serebii – is the inspiration for one of the more popular Pokemon fan communities, serebii.net, that’s not why this particular pokemon is notable.

Cerebi is like a gateway drug to the world of special event pokemon. Event pokemon are limited-release pokemon; they were originally handed out at physical events (hence the name) before the advent of wi-fi on the Nintendo DS. These days, for a few weeks you can go to certain retailers and connect to the Nintendo wi-fi there, and then you download these special pokemon. Celebi was the first one available for the most recent game, Black & White, though it is a reissue from many years ago. Many of them have some additional purpose beyond being awesome; a trio of pokemon released over 2010 allow you access to a special fourth pokemon in the new game, for example.

In case you missed it, the tagline for the Pokemon series in the English-speaking world is “Gotta catch ‘em all!”. As you might imagine, the existence of special event pokemon can make catching them all particularly difficult. I missed all of the 2010 event pokemon, despite living across the street from a GameStop. This irritates me to no end. Of course, event pokemon can almost never be bred, so you can only ever obtain one per copy of the game you have, if you manage to make it to the event.

So how might you go about obtaining these rare pokemon? You can trade, of course, but people aren’t likely to just give them up – though there are some people who will go out of there way to obtain multiple copies of these event pokemon specifically to trade. There’s a darker side to all of this, a seedy underbelly, and it is filled with hacked pokemon.

Yes, people care enough to hack copies of their games to give themselves extra copies of these pokemon. Worse, if you manage to trade for one, you might never know. Most competitive leagues don’t allow legendary pokemon anyway, but even still, you’ve got a little black market pokemon on your copy of the game, and you never know if this will cause issues down the line and ruin all your hard work. I might not take that risk, but plenty of other people will. That’s how far this goes, people. Folks out there are willing to risk losing access to all the pokemon they have for a shot at obtaining something like a Celebi. If you suspect you might have a hacked pokemon, you might want to check out this thread on the Serebii forums.

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April 4th, 2011 by Cassie