Is Mystery Gift a cheat?

Question

Ive read some that getting mystery gifts or doing any kind of game manipulation like talking to someone in-game and say something specifically can unlock some things like secret key can also damage or mess up the game? Im playing platinum, not on an emulator. I dont want to damage my ds or the game experience. Please advise what will not damage and what can damage/change the game and source, if possible? Does it change rng too? Will it cause any glitches? Thank you

Comments

Mystery Gift is a built in feature intended to unlock events and Pokemon that you can't otherwise unlock. No part of Mystery Gift to my knowledge has ever broken the game it's a part of. Even cheating to get the Mystery Gift Azure Flute that was never distributed in DPPt doesn't break your game and the event plays out like it was coded to.

The Secret Key just unlocks a room in Eterna Galactic HQ where you can change Rotom's form.

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Specifically where are you reading about Mystery Gift "messing up the game"?
Every glitch that you ever need to worry about is a specific, documented, and reproducible behaviour that you can find within one half-decent google search. Anybody scaremongering about how doing xyz will cause non-descript "damage" to the game without expanding on how that will happen should be ignored.

Answer 1

You have nothing to worry about. The Mystery Gift option won’t harm your game or your DS, and it won’t mess up any features.

Mystery Gift is a feature added by the game developers themself to allow them to give players free items or Pokemon. In Generation 4, you needed Wi-Fi connection. Most events were timed, and sometimes you needed to go somewhere in person to obtain the items in the older games. Receiving these gifts did not harm the game or console at all; perfectly safe freebies!

Nintendo Wi-Fi has since been discontinued on the DS family, meaning you can no longer use Mystery Gift if you tried. They still hand out Mystery Gifts on the newer Pokemon Games for the Nintendo Switch family, though!

However, there is a DNS exploit that allows you to obtain old Mystery Gift items in Platinum. This is unofficial, and not supported through the game developers, although it can’t harm your DS. If you want to learn about how to do that in more detail, the link above is a great guide on it :)

If you want to read up more about Mystery Gifts, Bulbapedia has a whole page about it in more detail, although I’ve summarized most of it here.

Hope this helps!