Hacking key items in Pokémon

Now I just want to get out from the start that I’m not a fan of hacking. I don’t like hacking or cheating in any sense, especially on online multiplayer games, since it’s not fair to other people. I didn’t used to mind so much, I used to own an Action Reply/Xploder etc. cartridge for just about every console I had, and used to use them on a regular basis. I guess I grew out of this as I got older. But there is one area my opinion on this wavers sometimes.

In Pokémon there are several items that let you unlock new areas of the games to catch rare and unique Pokémon. For example, in the 4th generation Oak’s Letter lets you unlock a new route to reach Shaymin, the Member Pass lets you enter a building in Canalave City to catch Darkrai, and the Azure Flute lets you unlock a secret area at Spear Pillar to catch the God Pokémon Arceus. The thing is these items are mainly given out in Nintendo Events. This isn’t so much of a problem these days with the addition of Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection to the 4th generation, allowing you to obtain these items over the internet, but in the previous generations it was a big problem. In those days events never even seemed to happen outside of Japan, and being a UK resident, getting a Mew in those days was rather problematic. However, even with the events that have been going on recently in the UK (I’ve been to two, an Arceus one and a Darkrai one) you still don’t seem to get the items. Instead, they send you the Pokémon in question directly, meaning that the in-game areas still stay off limits. The only key item I have ever managed to get hold of is Oak’s Letter when it was distributed over Wi-Fi for Platinum.

Now this presents a major dilemma: if Nintendo are never going to release these items to the public, is it really so wrong to hack them using a cheat cartridge? I personally wouldn’t like to do it, since I like all my Pokémon to be completely legitimate, but it seems to be a perfectly reasonable way to get the item if, say, you missed the Wi-Fi event because you were out of the country or something. It’d be just like you got them the legitimate way, so long as it affected nothing else in your game. Admittedly you wouldn’t get the Wonder Card, but since you can delete them anyway that hardly matters. This argument stood up far more firmly in the days of Red and Blue when there was absolutely no chance of getting a Mew for someone who lived in the UK. I’ll leave you to decide on this one.