How Pokémon GO Popularized Shiny Pokémon In The Mainline Games

How Pokémon GO took shiny Pokémon from a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence to something people hunt for fun.

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If you’ve been playing a new Pokémon game recently, whether it be Pokémon GO or Pokémon Sword and Shield, you’ve probably noticed that people are obsessed with collecting shiny Pokémon. Given their rarity and different color combinations, shiny Pokémon are highly sought after, and many gamers will spend hours trying to get their hands on one, but it wasn’t always this way. Although shiny Pokémon have been in the mainline games dating all the way back to Pokémon Gold and Silver, they weren’t nearly as popular as they are today, and that is largely thanks to Pokémon GO.

Grinding Back In The Day

Before the Switch generation of Pokémon games, shiny Pokémon were incredibly hard to come by. In Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, the final games of the 3DS generation, players had a 1 in 4,000 chance of encountering a shiny Pokémon, and a majority of them would complete the game without finding a single one.

People still collected shiny Pokémon, but it was mostly hardcore fans and YouTubers who spent hours soft resetting their games to help their chances. Due to the extreme rarity, collecting shiny Pokémon was an afterthought for casual players.

Making People Care

Pokémon GO was first released in July of 2016, but didn’t introduce shiny Pokémon until they brought shiny Magikarp and shiny Gyarados into the game in March of 2017. This move was certainly appropriate, as shiny Gyarados was the first shiny that most people encountered back in the days of Gold and Silver. Not only was this a great callback to an earlier game, but it also opened the doors for the shiny Pokémon craze that we have today.

What made shiny hunting different in Pokémon GO was the fact that they were much easier to come by. Instead of having a 1 in 1,024 chance at encountering one, the rate was increased to a much more reasonable 1 in 450. This change made it so that players could encounter shiny Pokémon a bit more frequently, but still occasionally enough to maintain their rarity. This is where things really took off.

A New Generation For Shiny Pokémon

After seeing the popularity of shiny Pokémon within Pokémon GO’s new format, GameFreak took notice while developing the new mainline games for the Switch. In Pokémon Let’s GO Pikachu and Eevee, players’ chances of encountering a shiny increased with the number of similar Pokémon that they’ve captured in a row. This led to a much higher interest in regards to collecting shiny Pokémon, and it quickly became a much bigger part of the game than it had ever been before.

Shiny hunting has an even bigger emphasis in Pokémon Sword and Shield. Although you still begin with a very low chance of encountering shiny Pokémon, that chance can be increased through various methods. Firstly, the more you encounter a Pokémon, your chances of finding a shiny are increased within the game. Breeding a certain Pokémon will also increase your chances each time. After encountering the same P0kémon 500 times, your chance of finding a shiny are increased by about three times.

Sword and Shield also have the Shiny Charm, an item that you can unlock after catching all 400 Pokémon within the game. Yes, that’s a whole lot of work, but once you’ve obtained this item, your chances of finding a shiny Pokémon are increased significantly.

The chances of finding shiny P0kémon in the mainline series are still much lower than the chances of finding them in Pokémon GO, but it’s clear that GameFreak is at least putting in an effort to make them a more relevant part of the game. Before Pokémon GO, nobody really talked about collecting shiny Pokémon, but it seems like now it’s all anyone talks about.

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