Highlights
- Shiny Pokemon are rare and offer little advantage, but fans love them, and they make for cool bragging rights.
- Showing off your Shiny catches at Pokemon Gyms is a thing, but finding them is a tough task in itself.
A new Pokemon GO player got an extremely lucky start to the game, revealing that they added a Shiny Gyarados they found in the wild to their team. Other players are impressed and a bit envious, with many sharing their stories as to how unlucky they’ve been with finding Shiny Pokemon.
Shiny Pokemon are simply colored variants of normal Pokemon. In Pokemon GO, they offer no significant benefits beyond the cosmetic difference and the bragging rights of having found and caught one. However, they’re also extremely popular with fans, with any Shiny catch being appreciated by the community. Some fans of various Pokemon games are definitely luckier than others, though, with this just being one example.
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Pokemon GO player NotAWeeb92 only got their start in the game a week ago, and wondered if their encounter with a Shiny Gyarados in the wild was rare, especially since they hadn’t added a Gyarados to their incomplete Pokedex prior. They reached out to the Pokemon GO subreddit community to find out, and were quickly told that yes, they had been pretty lucky with this find. While Gyarados isn’t a Mythical or Legendary Pokemon, it’s nonetheless loved by many fans and can prove to be a good addition on a player’s team. Encountering a Shiny Gyarados in the wild is a tough task, though.
Many fans in the comments talked about how they still hadn’t found a wild Shiny Pokemon despite having played the game for a long time. One told NotAWeeb92 that they were indeed lucky, because although the commenter had a Shiny Gyarados of their own, they’d had to grind and evolve it from a Shiny Magikarp. Other fans joked about the find not being that rare or lucky at all, saying that Shiny Gyarados is guaranteed as long as the player is at the Lake of Rage. This refers to its inclusion in Pokemon Gold and Silver as a guaranteed Shiny spawn, which isn’t an element of the Pokemon GO game.
The Search for Shiny Pokemon
Shiny Pokemon are a big deal in the Pokemon games, with many fans not only hunting them in the wild, but breeding Pokemon specifically to try and get a Shiny. The odds in any Pokemon game of getting a Shiny are low, but this rarity is what makes them so special. Pokemon GO players in particular like not only having a Shiny Pokemon on their roster, but showing them off in places like Pokemon Gyms by leaving their Shinies there to defend them. While there’s no telling if this particular player will be lucky enough to encounter more Shiny Pokemon in Pokemon GO, they’re already luckier than some long-time established players.
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Pokémon GO
After a test run via an April Fools’ joke on Google Maps, Pokemon GO was released to the public in the summer of 2016. The AR mobile app saw unparalleled success and continues to be one of the largest mobile games in the world, pulling in billions for developer Niantic.