That’s right, it’s that time of the week again. For this week’s post I’ve picked a favorite Legendary Pokemon that I regrettably forget about sometimes. Why I forget about this Pokemon, I don’t know, but it is a favorite of mine, regardless. This week I’m going to talk about the fabled Voice of the Forest, Celebi.
I had first learned about Celebi though a friend of mine who had gotten a Celebi in his own game by means I will get into later. At first I didn’t believe that it was a legitimate Pokemon for reason. I guess at the time I thought it was some weird glitch Pokemon created as a result of my friend abusing his game too much. But later after my friend and I had linked up to trade Pokemon I went to the Trainer House in Viridian City for a battle, and since I had linked up with my friend the NPC had all my friend’s Pokemon. One of those Pokemon was Celebi, and I soon realized that it was indeed a genuine Pokemon.
I asked my friend to trade me a Celebi and he later sent me a spare. At the time, Celebi was a “secret” Legendary Pokemon, like the famed one hundred and fifty-first Pokemon that will be the subject of a later post. And by the time the fourth Pokemon movie came around, Celebi’s existence became fully known to the public. Celebi’s most well known power is its ability to travel through time. It can’t control time though, that’s Dialga’s domain. But the ability to travel through time is still quite powerful. Celebi can also restore plant life to good health and is known as a protector of forests. It’s also known to be quite playful.
Hangout: This is where things start to get a little… complicated. But believe it or not, Celebi can be found and captured in the wild in generation two, specifically in Pokemon Crystal. You know when you go through the Ilex Forest and see that little shine to the forest’s protector? At first glance one would think that it’s just some aesthetic thing that the programmers put in for kicks. But in Crystal that little shrine is used to call Celebi from wherever (or whenever) it is.
So how does one call Celebi to the shrine you ask? By using a little item known as the GS Ball. How it works is that you take the GS Ball to the famed Pokeball designer, Kurt, in Azalea Town and leave it with him for twenty-four hours. This next part is just speculation. But I think that when you come back, Kurt tells you to take the ball to the Ilex Forest Shrine. Place in the ball in the shrine, and Celebi shows up from out of nowhere. Then all you have to do is just interact with the little forest guardian and catch it.
So now you’re probably reading this post and asking how one gets the GS Ball in the first place. This I’m afraid is where things become even more complicated. Legitimately, the GS Ball was only available in Japan by using a device called the Pokemon Mobile System GB. Basically it was a device that allowed you to plug your Gamboy Color into your cell phone.
If you want to see a picture of this little device and learn more about the various things you could do with it, click here.
The functions of this imaginative little device could be accessed through a revamped Pokemon Center in Goldenrod City called the Pokemon Communications Center. From what I understand it was kind of a precursor to some of the Wi Fi stuff in the DS games. But it was through the functions of the communication center that the GS Ball was distributed. So why wasn’t the Mobile System GB available outside of Japan? Because at that time cell phones outside of Japan weren’t as big or as advanced.
I mean today we have cell phone that can do anything from taking a picture to opening your garage door. But in the mid to late nineties in the U.S., cell phones were just cell phones. In the U.S. the only way to obtain the GS Ball, or just obtain Celebi, was to use that magical little cheat code device known as the Game Shark. That was what my friend used to get his Celebi and the one he traded me. There is also a glitch in the game that can be used to get Celebi, but it’s not one I recommend using.
The GS Ball: I think I should warn those of you reading that this next part may turn into a little rant about how the writers of the Pokemon anime screwed up. So if you want to skip the part, I’ll understand. Anyway, the previously mentioned GS Ball did play a somewhat prominent role in the anime. After the events of the Indigo League, Professor Oak asks Ash and his friends to go to the Orange Islands to pick up a mysterious item from another Pokemon scientist known as Professor Ivy. The mysterious item of course is the GS Ball.
When Ash and the gang finally arrive at Professor Ivy’s lab, the good scientist reveals that she and her assistants had tried several unorthodox methods to open the GS Ball, such as lasers and hacksaws. And all of their attempts not only ended in failure, they did not even leave a scratch on the mysterious relic. Now I would like to take a moment and point out that the GS Ball, though odd, was still a Pokeball. So they might’ve been able to open the thing by, oh… I don’t know… throwing it? It’s rather obvious when you think about it.
But as it was pointed out to me once before, that kind of logic doesn’t occur to characters in a show like the Pokemon anime. It’s sort of like how it never occurs to Ash and his friends that those nice but oddly familiar people might be Team Rocket, or that the best time to attack those three losers from Team Rocket is when they’re performing their little motto. Anyway, Professor Ivy asks Ash to take the GS Ball back to Professor Oak to see if he can’t figure it out. But of course rather than heading back to Pallet Town right away to deliver the ball, Ash decides to take on the Orange League. So the GS Ball was put on the backburner for a while.
I would like to point out that I did like the Orange League arc. One of the things I liked about it was that it began to develop Ash and Misty’s relationship (which was later dashed, but let’s try and focus on one thing at a time). Anyway, when Ash finally brought the GS Ball to Professor Oak, he couldn’t figure the thing out either. So the good professor asks Ash to take the ball to Azalea Town Johto, where the famed Pokeball craftsman, Kurt, could examine it. So the GS Ball is put on the backburner for a few more episodes while Ash takes on more gym leaders and does some other stuff. Then finally Ash and his two sidekicks reach Azalea Town and leave the GS Ball with Kurt… and that’s it. The GS Ball never shows up again.
What happened was that the GS Ball was originally planed to contain a Celebi that was to play a major role in a story arc that most likely involved time travel. Like maybe Celebi was going to take Ash and his friends back in time to stop some evil dude. But when it was decided that Celebi would become the focus of the fourth Pokemon movie, the GS Ball arc was considered redundant and just dropped. So the writers just left the GS Ball with Kurt and hoped that the fans would just forget about it over time. I’m sure that the younger fans forgot about the GS Ball, I’m sure that the fans that didn’t start watching the anime until the Hoenn Saga didn’t even know about the GS Ball in the first place.
But fans like myself who had been watching the anime from the beginning did not forget about the GS Ball, we were just really annoyed that they didn’t do anything with it. Or at least I was. To me this is one of the three great mistakes that the writers of the anime made, the other two being the failure to explore Ash’s connection to Ho-Oh, and replacing Misty with May. Of course I’m sure some of the blame should be put on the producers too. And the kicker of it is that the fourth movie wasn’t even that great, at least not to me. Sure, Ash meeting Professor Oak as a kid was a little interesting, but other than that I’m sorry I ever wasted money on the video.
I think that pretty much wraps it up for this week. I think this has turned out to be the longest Legendary Pokemon of the Week Post I’ve done so far. Starting next week I’m going to begin a series of three posts on my favorite Legendary Pokemon that are considered to be guardians of the sea. The first one is going to have a tie-in with next week’s Interesting Specimen post. So you could say that my plan for these posts has already been… hatched. That’s a hint for next week’s post. So until next time.
