Some Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen Players Have Racked Up Dozens of Hours in the Games Without Ever Leaving Oak's Lab

A lot of Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen players have been spending countless hours repeating the same tasks over and over again without ever leaving Professor Oak’s lab in Pallet Town, trying to pick up the game’s elusive shiny starters. Shiny hunting is one of the Pokemon community’s most popular pastimes, but many players in Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen seem to be taking the practice to new heights.

Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen were first launched in 2004 for the Game Boy Advance, but they’re seeing a major resurgence in popularity. Retelling the tale of the original classic pair of Pokemon games released eight years prior, these games feature much sharper visuals and some updates to the gameplay over the original Game Boy games, including every Pokemon in generations 1-3. The announcement that FireRed and LeafGreen would be coming to Nintendo Switch, which was made ahead of the franchise’s official 30th anniversary Pokemon Day livestream, caught fans by surprise, and players have been flocking back to them since their Switch release on February 27.

Why Pokemon FireRed is Likely Outselling Pokemon LeafGreen (& It Has Nothing to Do with Charizard)

Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen’s latest release on Switch will likely see the former selling more than the latter for long-established reasons.

Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen Players Go to Extremes With Starter Shiny Hunting

While recapturing the nostalgia of the early Pokemon games has drawn a lot of players back in, many have spent a long time at the starting gates, soft resetting FireRed and LeafGreen games in the hopes of opening up a Poke Ball to find a shiny Charmander, Bulbasaur, or Squirtle inside. Some have reportedly spent dozens of hours and thousands of resets just to get the starters they were after, with players sharing images of Pokemon that took up to 10,000 resets to get their hands on, often divided across multiple play sessions that never resulted in a saved game. The practice of hunting for shiny starters was growing into such a large movement that the moderators of the Pokemon FireRed subreddit even had to create a megathread to clean up clutter and cut down on toxic behavior in the community, vowing to delete every other new post dedicated to the subject.

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The amount of time players have spent hunting shiny starters is understandable, as the odds of a starter Pokemon being shiny in the game are one in 8,192, giving players a chance of just a bit over 0.01 percent for a starter to be shiny each time they start up a new game. While there are plenty of shiny hunting methods that players can normally use to increase their odds, like the Masuda Method or using a Shiny Charm, they won’t work before leaving the lab for the first time, making the grind of trying to get a shiny starter all the more intense.

It’s not just the starters who have been getting special attention, as Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen‘s Legendary Pokemon have also caused players to dump huge amounts of time in the game, just trying to find a shiny version. Legendary shiny hunting doesn’t seem to be nearly as popular as starter shiny hunting right now, though it does take nearly as much dedication. One fan shared an image of a shiny Ho-Oh they caught, claiming that they reset the game 2,500 times just for the chance to encounter one.

There are even those unfortunate few players who have been starting over thousands of times with nothing to show for it. Unlike pity systems in gacha games like Genshin Impact, shiny hunting for starters isn’t something the developers put into the game organically, and while more attempts mean more chances to get lucky, each individual reset still yields the same one-in-8,192 chance. On the flip side of that equation, some players have been incredibly fortunate, sharing shiny Charmanders that they picked up after as few as 20 resets, which have made them the envy of the community.