Shiny Pokémon

I’ve been in a Pokémon mood recently. To be more specific, I have been spending a lot of time doing research on shiny Pokémon. There are two things that are to blame for this. The first is because of how many shinies I have gotten in Pokémon Legends Arceus. That game gives out shinies like they are going out of style. The biggest reason though is because of the Darkrai event that happened last month. Now Darkrai is probably my favorite Pokémon from Generation IV if we are talking legendaries. Not necessarily because of his moves, but I just find the concept of a nightmare Pokémon interesting. In fact, i honestly think that Darkrai and Cresselia could have starred in there own generations for their own storyline. They had a good one in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky and frankly speaking have some of the most interesting concepts among most legendaries. So naturally I was excited to see the return of Darkrai and I thought the best way to commemerate this was to get him as a shiny. It took about a week, but I did manage to finally claim him. It’s a shame about his careful nature, but I’m still quite happy. To kill time during that week, I wanted to research a bit about shiny Pokémon to see if there was a way to get Darkrai easier. There was not, but I did learn a fair bit. Today, I thought I would share some general information for you if you plan on hunting for these guys in different games. I won’t cover anything too specific so if you want more in depth data about how shinies are calculated, then head over to Bulbapedia to find out more. With all that being said, let’s talk for a bit.

The alternate sprites we now know as shinies were first introduced in Generation II to highlight that the game now had colored sprites. There was a rare chance that the game would produce a Pokémon that would end up being shiny. These odds were mainly based around a Pokémon’s IVs or Individual Values leading them to be a bit stronger than normal Pokémon. In later Generations the formula would be changed so that isn’t the case and would cement the odds as being around 1 in 8192. In this generation they had no way to guarantee shiny odds improving so you had to get lucky. Soft resetting did become more popular though. It is a specific command to reset a game to force a Pokémon’s values to be rerolled which could potentially leave it shiny. This is basically the only relaible way to hunt for most legendary Pokémon in any generation. Once we got to Generation IV, they decided to make things a little bit easier by adding in chaining methods and most notably the Masuda Method. The Masuda Method allowed you to increase your chances of an egg being shiny, so long as the parents were Pokémon from two different countries. This drastically decreased the odds to about 1 in 1365. So I hope you have some Dittos in your PC. A couple more things that deserve special mention. First off, in Generation VI, the shiny odds were increased. They are now 1 in 4096 encounters which is half as much as the previous encounter rate from preceeding generations. The other thing that is noteworthy is they introduced the concept of Pokémon beign shiny locked. That means that no matter how many times you reset, they will never be shiny. This was first introduced in Generation V and to this day there are still some Pokémon that cannot be shiny. Naturally this mainly applies to legendary Pokémon.

So you are probably wondering why I just regurgitated a bunch of information you could have found on Bulbapedia or Serebii if you were interested. You might be wondering about why I am writing this in the first place. Well, the first reason is I wanted to gloat just a little about getting a shiny for the first time in quite a while. The last one I got was years ago in Pokémon Emerald which I surprisingly still have saved. If you are wondering it was a shiny Swablu. I do realize there are many shiny I have caught in Pokémon Legends Arceus, but I don’t really count those ones since it is a spinoff title. The second reason I brought all this up is that when I was beginning to get interested in shiny Pokémon again, I realized there is a lot to be wary of when hunting. There is a lot of research you may need to do if you are going for specific hunts and the Pokémon is fairly difficult to obtain. Even if you do manage to get lucky and find your traget shiny, you need to ensure that you can actually capture it if you need to face it in battle. The last thing you want is for a shiny Pokémon to cause itself to faint because you couldn’t catch it in time. Obviously, it would be good to use a Master Ball in that case, but what if you run into another shiny down the road? It’s like they say, prepare for the worst and hope for the best.This could just me being a little naggy, but if it helps you in your shiny endeavors then it was all worth it. Trust me, if you think failing shiny Pokémon in games like Pokémon Legends Arceus is painful, try going back to games before the shiny odds were increased. I am doing that right now actually. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know the answer myself. see you next time.