Pokemon Fan Spends Five Years On An Insane Shiny Hunt

"Shiny hunters are Arceus' strongest soldiers in the community, but I think we may have found the strongest among them. One fan did a somewhat unorthodox Shiny hunt not in one of the RPGs, but in a battle simulator spin-off on the Wii that is 20 years old. The odds of a rare, alternate-colored monster showing up in it are far more complicated than that of your average game."

"You can acquire these outfits by beating a trainer wearing them in the game's single player mode, but each of these trainers shows up during what is essentially a long boss run of high level battles, and their outfits have as little a chance of changing as a rare Poke9mon has of showing up in a base game. That's a roughly 1 in 8192 spawn chance."

"So, if you want to Shiny hunt these outfits, you'll have to reload and fight through these battles over and over just to get one of them. That wasn't enough for Noa_Kyogre, who has collected the full set of six, not once, but twice, and asserts they are the first person to do so. The double dipping came from finding the full set in both the Japanese and international versions of the game."

Shiny hunters pursue alternate-colored variants of Pokémon and related cosmetics. A fan spent five years hunting Shiny costumes in Pokémon Battle Revolution, a 20-year-old Wii battle simulator where trainers can wear themed monster outfits. Those outfits can appear in Shiny color schemes, for example a yellow-and-green Lucario instead of blue-and-black. Outfits are obtained by defeating trainers in single-player boss-run battles, and Shiny variants have roughly a 1 in 8,192 spawn chance. The hunt requires repeatedly reloading and replaying high-level battles. The player Noa_Kyogre completed full six-piece Shiny costume sets twice: once in the Japanese version and once in the international version.

Read at Kotaku