Pokemon: There’s Nothing Worse Than A Bad Shiny
I love hunting for shinies in Pokemon, but there’s nothing worse than finding one that looks so bad you want to run away.
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Given that Pokemon stories aren’t often that long, shiny hunting is one of the most enticing reasons to stick around after becoming the regional Champ of a mainline entry. Some players also strive to complete the Pokedex, while others dip their toes in the competitive scene and accidentally spend 500 hours breeding for the perfect Scorbunny – oops! In the vast majority of cases though, shiny Pokemon are the primary means of maintaining player retention. You’re hardly going to Bottle Cap a non-shiny Larvitar, right?
For the most part, this is understandable. I still remember the first shiny I ever caught – a Golbat in Pokemon Crystal when I was five years old. I thought my game was broken. “Why is Golbat green?” I thought to myself. “Do I need to bring it to the vet?” Eventually someone told me this colouration was, in fact, the result of a one-in-over-8,000 chance. I evolved Golbat into Crobat and it became the Applin of my eye, my pride and Baltoy. Some time later, a kid on my road started a new game on my cartridge and instantly saved. I have cried myself to sleep ever since.
I’ve had a few more shinies over the years, including a grey Manectric, a blue Porygon, and, of course, a red Gyarados, among others. All of these shinies are solid and represent intriguing spins on their base design. I’m yet to be lucky enough to nab a shiny Gigalith, who I would argue boasts one of the best aesthetics in Pokemon history, but I’m sure I’ll manage to hatch a purple Roggenrola one day. I will inevitably call it Prince in honour of purple rock ‘n’ roll.
The issue, then, isn’t really that shinies are rare – in fact, given that Sword & Shield are still rife with hacked and illegal Pokemon, rarity is the only thing that allows legitimate shinies to maintain their inherent prestige. The problem, reader, is that some shinies are just… bad. There is no worse feeling in Pokemon than spending hours upon hours on a thankless shiny hunt just to encounter something you’d rather run away from.
How do I know this? Well, just this morning I was bombing around the Lake of Outrage, hatching eggs and crashing headfirst into any ‘mon that wasn’t pure rubbish. Dragapult? Hatterene? Gyarados? Jolteon? Surely between those, my Scorbunny eggs, and my Shinx eggs, I was going to find an excellent shiny at some point. I was half-correct – I found a shiny alright, but it was anything but excellent.
My Lake of Outrage biome this morning was ravaged by thunderstorms, which explains why Jolteon was the Eeveelution in town. This weather is also prime time for catching Rotom, whose shiny form is… okay. I mean, it’s rare, so picking one up at least means you can arrive at a link trade with a decent bargaining chip. Obviously, Rotom wasn’t shiny. I smacked it with a Behemoth Bash and put my Switch down for two seconds to boil the kettle, at which point I heard battle music and lazily picked it back up to run without looking. Just a split second before doing so, I heard the shiny audio cue. Another Rotom? Gardevoir? Haxorus? Dragapult?!
Galvantula. Gen 5’s “EleSpider” Pokemon who I had completely forgotten even existed. There are plenty of Pokemon out there with average or lacklustre shiny variants, although ‘mons with downright bad designs are almost as rare as shinies themselves. Put it this way: If you’re lucky enough to find a shiny and unlucky enough for it to be bad, the net luck veers so far past unlucky territory that you’ll probably never want to play Pokemon again. To reiterate: Galvantula. You can hardly even tell it’s shiny – it just looks like an equally bad version of an already bad Pokemon.
The thing about shinies is that finding one is generally considered as indirect confirmation that there will be a significant amount of time between this encounter and your next. When you get a good shiny – say, Eevee, Dratini, or Charmander – the fact you’re going to have to wait potentially hundreds of hours for another is drastically outweighed by the excitement of finally obtaining the shiny in question. When you get a bad one, however, all you want to do is save and slowly, sadly switch your console off. All those eggs, all those encounters, all those trades, and for what? Galvantula? Yeah…
I’ve been playing Pokemon for over 20 years. Just this weekend, I posted an outrageous 3,000-word theory on how Pokemon Legends: Arceus – despite technically being a prequel set in the distant past – is going to start where this month’s Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl ends. I’ve opened several Evolving Skies packs, hatched a bunch of eggs in Sword & Shield, and put around 20 minutes into Pokemon Go already today – and that was all before I started work this morning. This is a series I care about deeply. If I’m saying a shiny is bad, it’s bad – end of story, no debate, thanks but no thanks.
Pokemon is one of the best video game series ever made, but finding a bad shiny hundreds of encounters into a shiny hunt spanning well over a week is unprecedentedly disheartening. On which note… anyone in the market for a shiny Galvantula? Hit me up with offers on Twitter – preferably Umbreon or Gigalith, cheers.
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