I have been playing Pokémon games for the last two decades of my life and, over that time, I’ve done just about everything you can do in the series… except catching a truly random shiny.

I’ve finished a Pokédex or two, beat all the main storylines, countless gyms and elite four members, I’ve spent hours hunting for dumb rare Pokémon spawns and other completionist nonsense that the series loves.

Hell at one point I even got into the competitive side of the videogames and bred my own perfect team. I still remember wasting an entire week’s worth of holiday in primary school endlessly hatching Heracross trying to find the perfect combination of nature and IVs.

Throughout all of this I have never once encountered a random shiny Pokémon. By that I mean a wild Pokémon that is not specifically programmed by Game Freak to be shiny.

The famous red Gyarados, just recently the free shiny versions of Zacian and Zamazenta or similar events don’t count in my book.

Many may be shouting at their screens right now because there are various ways to farm for a shiny or improve your chances to see them. Game Freak even creates items specifically to do this too.

Those I have tried to avoid over the years because, again, I just want that experience of running into a shiny completely by chance. Well, in Pokémon Legends: Arceus I got that chance, and I blew it.

Just watch the video and we’ll have a sitrep afterwards.

For those who haven’t played the game or are confused by what happened there, let me explain my failure.

In Legends: Arceus collecting resources is a big part of the game. To collect many resources you need to throw out your Pokémon to harvest them for you, which grants them experience and you the resources.

The game is very loose with this mechanic and allows you to throw your Pokémon out to do this while you carry on with other activities such as exploring and picking up items off of the ground.

Some resource clusters are hiding Pokémon, a fact I knew, but mostly ignored because I was quite far into the game at this point and had seen all of them already. When they popped out I would usually just run away and end the battle to save time.

What I didn’t know, and what I am warning players of now, is that you can automatically end a battle by having the player character be physically too far away.

This is exactly what happened in the video above when a shiny Geodude jumped out of that rock and I missed my chance to catch it.

You can see the shiny stars icon next to the Geodude’s name and in the top left corner its alternate colour is even shown in the Pokédex update notification.

Just reload the game, idiot

Now that Legends: Arceus has been out for a few days in the hands of countless players certain pieces of information have come to light, such as the fact that spawned shiny Pokémon will remain available in the overworld if the player reloads a save.

Why didn’t I do this when I missed my chance at the shiny Geodude? This video was captured well before the 28th January release date when I was playing a pre-release review copy of the game. The knowledge that shiny Pokémon stick around between saves was simply not around then.

On top of this I had not saved for quite some time. Even if I knew about the save exploit I was not sure if one had been made close enough to this event to save me.

So with this game finished – see my review here – it’s back to waiting for the next game and another chance to catch a random shiny.