As you may remember, I have been hunting for a Shiny Shaymin in my copy of Pokémon: Shining Pearl for quite some time. I would like to say that the hunt is finally over. However, that would make me a liar. Trust me, when it happens the title will probably be in all caps out of happiness. Today, I decided to talk about something else. Now, fairly recently I learned that there is no issue with leaving Shaymin to lounge in the grass while I leave to go do other things. I should have expected as much considering you can just run and come back to reset it, but sometimes I get tunnel vision. This discovery meant I could try out other things in the game again. There was one particular activity that I wanted to try, but I have never seen any success in attempting it. This activity is called PokéRadar chaining.
For those of you who are not aware, the PokéRadar is an item you can get after beating the Elite Four and getting the National Dex. There are certain Pokémon that can only be found in the game through this method. What you do is go to a large area of grass, use the item, and go into one of the shaking patches of grass. If you are lucky you will find a Pokémon you don’t normally see in the area. However, do note that it is best to use a Repel when doing this so that you don’t get interrupted by other wild Pokémon. Here is where things get interesting. If you catch or defeat the Pokémon that appears in the shaking grass, you may get new shaking grass patches after the encounter. Each time you do this it will have the same Pokémon as when you first started using the PokéRadar. This is called chaining and is a method used to shiny hunt because the longer you can keep your chain, the better your odds become. While it is a bit more streamlined than the original method in the Gen IV games, each streak has at least a 7% chance of breaking with each encounter. To get to the highest odds of a 40 chain, you do need a bit of luck. One day I decided to test it out during an outbreak. You might be able to guess which one.
As you might have guessed from the top right corner and the bird peeking out of the grass, I hunted for Doduo as a test phase and it went decently well. I managed to get a chain of forty and got the shiny patch. As you can see, the shiny Pokémon is indicated by a sparkling patch. No matter where you are on the chain, if you see a sparkling patch, that encounter is guaranteed to be shiny. I managed to get a couple shiny Doduo before the chain broke. However, I had another target I really wanted to hunt for: Nidoran.
Now both the male and female versions can appear in the grass on Route 201. However, I don’t know if it was because of my version or something but I mainly saw the male version in the grass so I went hunting for that. Unfortunately, this one took a bit longer. It took me seven or eight decent runs at it before I finally managed to get myself a chain of forty. However, having come this far, I was slightly worried. You see, unlike with Doduo, I didn’t have a good way of getting this shiny outside of this game. The only other place I could potentially encounter one was in Pokémon Shield as that would be with much worse odds. Doduo on the other hand could easily be found in Pokémon Violet, a game where it is very easy to get shiny Pokémon. So naturally I hoped I could get the three I needed to complete the line. The good news is, I managed to get four of them before the chain broke at forty-five. More than enough for my needs. I haven’t evolved them yet but I am glad I got enough when I need to do so. Let’s hope the female sparkles like this soon too. This is quite a welcome distraction from Shaymin after all. It also gives me hope since it proves that shiny Pokémon do still exist in my game. Until next time everyone!
That Casual Gamer Guy 