One Silly Pokémon Go Rule Nearly Lost Me A Shiny

Pokemon Go does a lot of silly things. It advertises poses that aren’t available. The developers forget to turn on shinies for New Zealand Community Days on a regular basis. We get make-up rewards and posts on social media saying, ‘we’re sorry’.

A couple of weeks ago, we received another apology. I’m not sure what Niantic messed up and when, but every Pokemon Go player received Timed Research tasks that rewarded a bunch of encounters with Omanyte and Kabuto. All you had to do was catch one Pokemon, then catching each fossil would unlock the next.

That’s the first silly Pokemon Go rule. The weird make-up research thing. You’re a multi-billion dollar company servicing the biggest mobile game ever made for the biggest IP in the world; just don’t mess up in the first place. The whole thing is one big silly. But the next is on me.

Self-Imposed Shiny Rules

I have a shiny Kabuto. Two, in fact, although one has since evolved into a shiny Kabutops. That vivid green is an excellent colour palette for a shiny, and I’m happy to have the pair in my collection. I don’t have a shiny Omanyte, however. That’s right, I have 97 out of 151 possible shiny Pokemon from the Kanto region, and Omanyte is not one of them.

So when those little sparkles lit up my phone screen and a little purple cephalopod appeared, I was ecstatic. I was about to add two shinies to my shiny dex, and that lovely purple colouration was music to my… eyes?

There was just one problem. I had no Poke Balls.

This seems like a non-issue. You can get more balls in Pokemon Go by spinning Poke Stops, completing research, and straight-up buying them in the store. But I wasn’t out of balls, I was out of Poke Balls. Here’s where my second silly Pokemon Go rule comes into play.

I only catch shiny Pokemon in Poke Balls. Your bog-standard red and white spheres. I’m not entirely sure why. In the main series games, I try to match the colour of the shiny to the ball I use. Shiny Charizard in a Dusk Ball. Shiny Ponyta in a Quick Ball. You get the picture.

In Pokemon Go, I like to flex by catching shinies in Poke Balls. I don’t know who I’m flexing to. Nobody sees this. I don’t tell people about it, current article excepted. But it’s something I do. And I had no Poke Balls. 150 Great Balls, nearly 300 Ultra Balls, but zero Poke Balls.

I had to wait. I encountered the shiny Omanyte while I was at work, so I couldn’t just up and leave to farm some Balls. I’m also not going to pay real money for a freely available resource. And that shiny Omanyte will disappear in a few days, when the Timed Research expires.

When I was able to walk down the road to my nearest Poke Stop, I immediately got too excited and wasted the ball it gave me. Back to square one. The next time I was out doing errands, I wasn’t as casual. I grabbed my balls – not like that – and caught the shiny that had eluded me for so long. But this encounter so nearly ended in misfortune.

Why do we do these things to ourselves? Why do we play by Nuzlocke rules? Why do we randomise encounters and soup up the enemy AI? Why do we play Kaizo hacks? Why do we make games more difficult on a whim? To feel something, I suppose. Modern Pokemon is so dull, so easy, that we have to implement strict rules in order to have fun with it.

Some people create complex Egglockes. I catch all my shinies in Poke Balls. They’re so common in Pokemon Go, I want to feel a bit of danger. Some risk. Get that heart pumping. And my heart has never pumped so hard as when I realised that my usual stock of hundreds of Poke Balls was completely empty when I found that shiny Omanyte. I was so terrified of losing this shiny, mostly because I never expected to find it in the first place.

I flew very close to the sun this week. I nearly lost a shiny due to my own hubris. My deep-seated need to flex, somehow. It worked out this time, but it might not next. But I came out of it all with a smile on my face. Whatever you do to make Pokemon more interesting, make sure you’re having fun.