Something came to mind: Back in Gen I, Mew was the first Mythical only attainable via a limited time real life event because it was literally thrown in at the last minute and was never meant to be obtainable, right? So why exactly do Game Freak keep making these kinds of Pokémon when they’ve clearly got no reason to be so? You don’t expect me to believe Diancie, Hoopa and Volcanion were all last minute too, do you? Aren’t they inherently against the series slogan, “gotta catch ’em all”?

You know, I never thought about it that way, but that’s a good point.  The whole idea of Pokémon that are unobtainable in the game started as an accident.  I can only suppose that they kept it up because Mew worked so well.  Remember the mystique Mew had in the first-generation era?

Or, uh… I don’t know; maybe you don’t… damn, I’m old…

But basically the fact that there was this ‘secret Pokémon’ that existed but couldn’t be found or captured normally was the source of more rumours and speculation than just about any other aspect of the game.  It helped that the internet was still young then, and reliable information was hard to come by (I didn’t have an internet-capable device of my own, and even if I had I wouldn’t have known where to begin looking).  There is in fact at least one glitch that you can manipulate to obtain Mew in Red and Blue (I’ve done it), but to my knowledge it didn’t become widely known until well after the end of those games’ time.  I think the continued introduction of ‘secret’ Pokémon – first Celebi, then Jirachi and Deoxys, and so on – was designed to capitalise on the same sense of mystery and excitement that surrounded Mew.

Now, of course, the idea that these Pokémon exist and will inevitably be revealed by Nintendo in due course has become totally routine – as has the fact that the Pokémon fan community will find any information about them that exists in the games, long before we’re actually ‘supposed to.’  But maybe getting us to run around and trade scraps of information and speculation like that is all part of the fun?  They must know, after all, that this is not the 1990s anymore and our capacity to extract, verify and share this information is orders of magnitude above what it was in Mew’s time.  They’re not stupid.  I think they do it specifically to make us talk about it.