Remember when shiny Pokemon were good? My brother ran into a bright green Golbat in FireRed when we were kids, and promptly switched off his Game Boy because something had clearly gone wrong. He didn’t want to lose his precious Charizard in some kind of corrupted save (we’d been burned before by a dodgy copy of Emerald), so bye bye bat.
That was my only experience of shiny Pokemon for years. I didn’t spot any in Gens 4 or 5, and it’s only when I got back into the series hardcore that I started hunting for shinies. My first was a Ponyta I found via Alpha Sapphire’s DexNav feature. Many more followed, except that elusive Eevee that I hatched over 1,400 Masudaed eggs to try to find. Shinies became easier to get, and as I embedded myself in online communities I found out more effective methods of luring them to my PC. It was a far cry from the unbelievable playground tales, and I was hooked.
I branded myself as the ‘shiny hunter’ of my friendship group, amassing box after box of colourful Pokemon. To this day, I’ve only caught one full-odds shiny, an Alolan Meowth that I encountered on the way to catch the penultimate monster for my Sun & Moon PokeDex I was completing to get the Shiny Charm. Despite my brother encountering another full-odds shiny in the same game, he failed to catch it a second time (it was an Abra, RIP) which puts me firmly in the lead.
I’ve harvested shinies over the years, picking my favourite Pokemon, favourite colour switches, and competitive beasts to flex on the online ladder. Sword & Shield’s Dynamax Adventures added a random element to the hunting game, including a great chance to catch shiny Legendaries. I bagged myself a couple, as well as some niche Pokemon like Escavalier, which I never would have hunted but looks great. The problem is, shiny Pokemon are getting worse and have taken a nosedive in recent entries.
Scarlet & Violet has some of the worst shinies going, and a higher rate of bad colour-swaps than most Pokemon games. The current Gholdengo event, which gives players a chance to encounter a shiny Gimmighoul, has put this into stark perspective. Players couldn’t wait to get their hands on the silver surfe- wait, it looks like what? Did that really sparkle? Shiny Gimmighoul is slightly paler grey than its regular form – yes that tiny body in the chest is all that changes. Gholdengo? Its eyes turn from gold to silver.
There’s always been some bad shinies. Gengar is my ultimate bugbear, although that was thankfully righted with its Mega and Gigantamax evolutions. Garchomp, too, barely changes. Pikachu, the mascot for the whole series, has an awful shiny, although I do wonder if that was intentional in order to preserve the brand image. But, as I said earlier, Scarlet & Violet have a far worse hit rate than the older games when it comes to good looking shinies.
Maushold’s change is unnoticeable. Irons Treads and Hands have very subtle shifts in their metallic colours. The Baxcalibur line boils down to… different hands? Armarouge and Ceruledge had incredible potential for excellent shiny forms, and we get different eyes? The worst culprit of all is Paldean Tauros, which changes from black to a slightly different shade of black.
This is compounded by the fact that Scarlet & Violet removed traditional encounters. While I like the change as a whole, and it makes exploring Paldea far more interesting and exciting – more safari than RPG – it’s nigh on impossible to notice if you come across one of these shinies, even if you’re hunting them. There’s no sound cue, there are no sparkles on the overworld, there’s nothing to tell you that you’re running past a shiny Pokemon except for the colours. And when the changes are so subtle and the Switch’s screen so small, I dread to think how many shinies I sauntered past on my way to beat a Gym.
There are a whole host of reasons why I didn’t play much of Scarlet & Violet. The performance was the worst culprit, but the replayability of Pokemon has always come from shiny hunting for me. I have little interest in the Tera Raids that Game Freak is trying to position as some kind of live-service hook, and the shinies I would want to hunt for all look terrible. I’d even take more weird luminescent green shinies over ones that are indistinguishable from their original forms. Shiny Pokemon have gone downhill, but that’s the least of Pokemon’s problems.