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I’m going to be honest for a moment, at this point I resent Pokémon Go more than I enjoy it. That’s not going to stop me from playing it daily, at least for the foreseeable future.
Originally launched back in 2016, Pokémon Go is a mobile app where players can catch pretend animals that digitally spawn at real world locations. You probably don’t need me to tell you that, literally everyone on the planet was playing this game when it first released, Pokémon fan or not.
When Pokémon Go was first released I actually really enjoyed it. Sure the battle mechanics were a little simple, but the sense of community – seeing other players walking around real world locations, meeting up to tackle raids etc, was really welcoming. The game also released right when I was recovering from major surgery, and so I appreciated the encouragement to get walking around again during recovery.
It was there for me when I was nervous exploring a new area after moving house, and was a game I was able to bond with my mum over which was wonderful.
For a long time I really loved Pokémon Go, but the resentment slowly began to creep in.
Some of the ways that Pokémon Go has become less accessible have happened slowly over time. Transferring Shiny Pokémon to Pokémon Home came with daily transfer limits if you don’t spend real money, distance increases introduced during COVID were rolled back which impacted the ability for people to play from home, and increasing numbers of monetisation options were introduced to specifically to seemingly prey on player FOMO.
I’m not quite sure when Pokémon Go introduced battle passes, but they do that thing where they show you all of the Premium rewards that you COULD have already unlocked, and the rewards that are just out of reach that you could pay money to to jump some levels ahead just before the battle pass window closes to earn them. Those hooks are really hard for me to avoid being pulled in by as a player with autism and ADHD.
But the aspect of Pokémon Go that has me still spending money on the game, and playing it as a daily active player, is the way that the game has become the exclusive home of certain Shiny Mythical Pokémon.
I’ve talked about this before on this channel, but Shiny Pokémon are rare colour variant versions of creatures. They don’t do anything unique, but I find that their rarity makes them satisfying for me to collect.
Out of over 1,000 species, I have fewer than 20 left to find in their shiny forms.
Certain Pokémon in the series cannot be easily or at all found shiny due to something called a Shiny Lock, where the Pokémon is set to never spawn as its rare shiny variant in a given game. One type of Pokémon that this frequently applies to is Mythical Pokémon – Usually small magical critters like Mew, hidden in post game content or given away as special rewards.
A lot of Mythical Pokémon have never been made available shiny, or only as part of specific giveaways. Those that have been available are often acquired through really obscure and difficult means, or locked behind never repeated time limited events.
Pokémon Go has made some of these Shiny Mythical Pokémon available, for a price – both literal and figurative.
The first paid Shiny Mythical Event that I paid for in Pokémon Go was All-in-One #151, a quest you could pay to gain acces to in the summer of 2021, which would when completed grant the player with a legitimate Shiny Mew.
I’ve got a lengthier video on this channel detailing my full quest for a Shiny Mew, but here’s the short version – Unless you were in New York City one specific week in 2002, or went to a Japanese theme park in 2005, there’s basically no legitimate way to gain a Shiny Mew in 2026. You can cheat an item into a copy of Pokémon Emerald, or perform Arbitrary Code Execution on a glitched Gen 1 encounter, but basically the shiny creature was otherwise impossible to obtain.
So yeah, when Pokémon Go offered a quest to attain a legitimate Shiny Mew in 2021, I paid up.
The thing is, having paid real money for access to the quest, I assumed that earning the creature would be basically a formality, something I could complete in a weekend and have access to the Pokémon I’d paid for to access.
It took me more than a year to earn that Shiny Mew, and it basically pulled me back into being a daily active player. A lot of that has to do with how the paid for questline was designed, specifically to encourage dedicated daily active play.
I won’t go into huge detail here, you can check out my Shiny Mew video for that, but the big hurdle for me at the time was needing to hit Player Level 40.
If you play Pokémon Go today hitting level 40 probably sounds pretty trivial, but this was prior to Pokémon Go rebalancing their level curve, and increasing their player level cap.
At the time this quest was released I’d been a Pokémon Go player for 5 years, and was level 39. That sounds pretty good, until you learn that the level up EXP curve for Pokémon Go at the time was highly aggressive. Getting enough experience to go from level 1-39 was the same amount of experience as you would need to get from leve 39-40.
Getting to level 39 was the halfway point to gettibng to level 40.
I had to grind Pokémon Go obsessively, daily, for most of a year to earn that Shiny Mew. I was able to do so without spending any more money in the game, but resisting that spending pull has gotten more challenging in the years since.
The next Shiny Mythical quest that I purchased in Pokémon Go was “Wish Granted”, the 2025 quest to earn a shiny Jirachi.
Jirachi can in theory be earned outside of Pokémon Go, but the road to doing so is an insurmountable hurdle for many shiny hunters.
The short version – A bonus disc for Pokémon Colosseum can send a Jirachi to a [Gameboy Advance] copy of Ruby or Sapphire, but only once per save file. The player basically needs to replay the opening 10 minutes of Ruby or Sapphire each time they want to reroll for the Shiny Jirachi, making it one of the slowest reset shiny hunts in the series.
While I aimed to do the hunt one day, and I still do kind of, I was going to leave it until I’d completed the rest of my full Shiny collection first, due to the knowledge that some day transfers from these old games to the new ones would be shut off.
We’ve recently got confirmation this transfer shutoff will happen in February 2027. I might have time to start this hunt before then, but I doubt that I’m going to finish the rest of my shiny collection and have time to come back and do this full hunt, hence picking up the Pokémon Go quest last year as a backup option.
A year deep into this quest, I have only this past week finished step 1out of 6 toward this Shiny Jirachi.
The first step involved catching 385 Pokémon from each of 3 different regions, which took me basically a year because apparently where I live Johto spawns are weirdly rare, and I couldn’t force the game to give me the spawns that I needed to progress.
I’m currently in phase 2, trying to make 10 of my Pokémon “Best buddies”. This is a mechanic that I’ve never really bothered with in the past, but it involves earning 300 hearts per Pokémon doing daily activities. Realistically I can get 6, maybe 7, hearts per day per Pokémon by feeding them, playing with them, taking a screenshot of them (which is going to fill up my camera roll really quickly), and then playing 3 battles with them. I know that I can start the battle and then quit straight out of it and get credit for it to speed up a little time, but it’s still a lot of steps I’ve got to do.
In a little under 2 months I can complete this, I can have 10 best buddies, but only if I spend 20-30 minutes per day doing this incredibly repetitive task of feed a Pokémon, pet it, screenshot it, battle three times, switch to the next Pokémon, and do that again for all 10 creatures.
I could do this in half the number of days, but doing so would require Poffins, an item that costs 100 Pokécoins, each, and I would need one for each Pokémon each day, so that’s 1,000 Pokécoins per day. These can of course be bought with real money. So in as little as a month I could complete this step, if I gave into the temptation and spend a bunch of real world money.
OR I could spend an estimated 90 minutes playing the game per Pokémon to get that doubled bonus for free. That’s what, only an extra 15 hours of time commitment per day to halve my number of days for this phase of the quest.
And then there’s still multiple stages after that that I am going to need to complete that are equally obtuse, and dedicated to making me have to be a daily active player.
And while the Shiny Mew quest wasn’t too bad for me as someone trying to avoid compulsive spending, the Shiny Jirachi Quest released after Pokémon Go had introduced its battle passes, and as explained before that addition to the game made it WAY harder for me to avoid compulsively spending money. I know I’m the target market for FOMO based premium battle passes, I have medically diagnosed poor impulse control and collection craving tendencies.
The final Pokémon Go Shiny Quest, picked up this summer, is to earn a Shiny Diance, a Pokémon which has literally never been available shiny any other way. I had to pick this paid quest up if I want to eventually finish a full collection of Shiny creatures.
I’m currently on step 1, catch 500 Pokémon from the Kalos region. I have 46 total caught.
At a glance, future steps in this quest will require at least 2 months of daily active play, just to complete steps like “visit a Pokéstop on 21 days” and similar quests which cannot be simultaneously worked on.
I’m basically locked into daily active playing for god knows how long to get through the 500 Kalos catches task, before the 2 months minimum daily active play, to eventually get this creature.
As a reminder, I have already spent money to unlock these quests, and therefor these Shiny Pokémon. There’s a notable amount of Sunk Cost involved here, to not feel like I wasted that money. There’s an urge to make faster progress while playing, which leads to temptation to spend money in game to speed up progress with things like buying Poffins. Every day I’m seeing the battle pass, and being tempted to spend real money on that.
These quests are, by design, set up so that even with regular play, if you live somewhere off the beaten path, it’s going to take you forever to make progress.
Unless you spoof your location, or live on a highstreet with boosted spawns, completing these quests is a daily job, and even then one that is going to commit you to long term daily active play.
I get it – The people paying for these quests, like me, are the players proven willing to spend money in game. If you can encourage players like me to be daily active players, and not just dip in occasionally when a shiny mythical is on offer, you get a LOT more chances to get people like me to spend money.
I understand it, but it sucks.
Right now I’m dedicating 20-30 minutes daily to playing Pokémon Go, plus spending most of my day with an autocatcher on my desk while I work. I realistically need to also be making daily trips into town to somewhere with higher spawn rates, perhaps spending my lunch break catching Pokémon for an hour or so in town, to speed up that 500 Kalos catches task and eventually get through that. Even then, there will probably be another unique Shiny Mythical next summer to pull me back into daily active play.
I on paper enjoy Pokémon Go, but the more it feels like it’s a job or obligation, the more I find myself resenting it.
I don’t want Pokémon Go to feel like a second job. I don’t want to feel tied to a game that’s increasingly full of mechanics that tempt me to spend real money, and not feel able to just walk away from it.
I want to have a healthier relationship to playing this game, but at this point it’s first and foremost a formality that I am forced to engage with if I want to eventually complete my Shiny Pokémon collection.
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