When I started playing Pokémon again after a very long hiatus, I kind of had a loose idea of what I wanted to accomplish: complete the ‘dex, get a shiny charm, complete a living shiny national ‘dex. I held no delusions about how long it would take. This isn’t something that can be done over a few weekends; this is going to take me a long time. My plan with Ultra Sun, initially, was to complete the game as quickly as possible so I can work on completing the ‘dex. But along the way, I got distracted by Poipole.
Poipole is an Ultra Beast Pokémon that gifted to you by an NPC. It wasn’t shiny locked, (shiny locked Pokémon can never be obtained as shiny in whatever game you’re playing), so soft resetting was the only way to get it. Based on my light googling, gifted Pokémon isn’t affected by shiny charm, so I was facing a choice of just accepting it and continue burning through the game or soft resetting the game until it pops up in its alternate color. I decided to do the latter. Soft resetting involves saving your game at the last possible point before triggering the gift dialogue. You load your game, accept the gift, see if it’s shiny. If not, do a soft reset by pressing L, R, and Start or Select at the same time, rinse and repeat. I did this 4,302 times before it finally popped. It took about a week and a half, maybe two, a couple of hours a night just vegging out watching TV, and soft resetting. It’s a pretty low-bandwidth task so it’s not like I wasted time since I was able to do it while doing something else. And honestly, I feel like I got extremely lucky. Because your chances don’t get better with each reset; I could have very easily not hit the target and still be soft resetting my life away for the next week, month, or even year. I will tell you this much though: after 4,302 tries, I am ready to move on.
The sad truth of the matter though is that I’m going to have to eventually do the same thing when I get gifted Type: Null, the other gifted Pokémon that can’t breed and hatch from an egg, even if I don’t do it during this playthrough. I’m going to have to play this game at least four times most of the way to get normal and shiny versions of Poipole and Type: Null and their respective evolved forms Naganadel and Silvally. I’ll probably do it for Type: Null this time. Sounds daunting, but it could be worse: I could have accidentally soft reset over the shiny, like this guy:
I’ve had my fair share of video game fails, but this hurts to watch.
Shiny Type: Null, here I come. Please RNG gods, be nice to me.
