Now that Pokémon Sun and Moon are officially out, you’d expect trainers everywhere to jump right into the world of Alola. Actually, though, veteran players with a lot of patience are opting to restart their games endlessly, up to hundreds of times, all in the name of gaming the system.
As many of you know, Pokémon games all open with a big decision: what “starter” monster will you pick? After choosing between Popplio, Rowlet, and Litten, most of us just take whatever the game hands us and go off on our merry way. The secret is that the starters the game generates for you are not predetermined—there can be variances.
The biggest one is something known as “shiny Pokémon,” which are creatures that come in that have special, non-standard coloring. There’s a very rare chance that a starter might appear as a shiny from the get-go, which is exactly what some people are hoping from when they restart their game over and over again. But, there are other incentives to reset your Sun and Moon game, too. Maybe you want a specific gender for your Pokémon—Popplio owners in particular seem concerned with the 87% chance that it will appear as a male, for example. Another compelling reason to restart your game many times is to make sure that your starter has the right nature or statistics, so that it’s competitively viable.
Whatever the motivation, one thing is clear: players are braving a lot of tedium before playing Sun and Moon (or are planning to):
YouTuber SmkGaming05 has some tips for anybody who might be interested in soft resetting their games for better starters, which you can watch below. Worth noting that when Sun and Moon initially present the starters to you, they do not LOOK shiny. You won’t know if the monster is shiny until you select it, which might mean sitting through the initial cutscenes repeatedly:
If it helps, out of all of the starters, it seems that Rowlet will be the easiest shiny monster to obtain, because it’s the first option on the menu selection.
Good luck to all you shiny hunters out there!