My first ever shiny Pokemon

Right now, I'm 29. Back when Pokemon came out in 1996, it was the in thing. As I didn't have my own Gameboy or Pokemon game, or Pokemon cards, my enjoyment of Pokemon as a young boy was primarily through other people who had the game and I'd watch as they played through Pokemon Red, Blue or Yellow. I didn't even watch the anime so my enjoyment of the Pokemon games was purely from a third person perspective.

I didn't mind though and when the next fad came along, everyone else moved on as well. I was lucky enough in college to download an emulator and I was able to play through my first Pokemon game shortly after college in 2011 - Pokemon Fire Red. I refused to play the other games as I really only knew the original 150 and Fire Red was set in the same region as Red/Blue/Yellow so I knew the maps ahead of time by heart.

I was playing through the game normally and casually (I never even knew people played Pokemon hard core) and I knew what kind of team I wanted to assemble. One of my Pokemon would be a Kadabra so the first area you find an Abra is north of Cerulean City so I went there to go Abra hunting. Now, Abras are tricky to catch. If you don't incapacitate them fast enough, they'll just teleport away. I had a specific kind of Abra in mind as well. I wanted one with a specific ability and one that was male. So if I chanced upon a female, I'd escape the battle. After I'd catch a bunch, I'd go to the PC and check if the Abras I caught had the abilities I wanted. I picked one and it was that Abra I trained and evolved into a Kadabra.

It wasn't until I was going to fight Koga that I noticed something strange every time I sent out my Kadabra. Stars would fly around it and his shoulder pads were more purple than the brown I expected Kadabras to have. What's more, when I'd look through my party, there was this small star that the other Pokemon in my party didn't have. I thought it was some sort of bug that I needed to have fixed or something. Little did I know, the Kadabra I had just trained from an Abra was a shiny one.

I googled, "stars fly when Pokemon sent out" and I had my answer right away. I didn't even know that shiny Pokemon was a thing. The old Gameboy games didn't have color so this was all really new to me. I found out that you could get shiny Pokemon from breeding 1 in 8,192 times and catching one in the wild was an even rarer feat. I was thrilled! My Kadabra which was already a powerhouse in my party was more special than I had previously anticipated. I had party wished I knew this ahead of time but part of me just saw how lucky I was at having incidentally caught an Abra which was exactly the kind I wanted and it just so happened to be shiny as well. Damn! Game Freak really knows how to entice their player base.

Shiny Pokemon don't excite me as much now as they did before though but I can't forget how that first one excited me so much. Really, the shiny-ness of a Pokemon has nothing to do with the strength of the Pokemon but it's just a tiny incentive to keep playing in case you find another one lurking in the wild or in eggs.

Now, especially with Pokemon Go, my nephews keep coming up to me and showing me all their shiny Pokemon and I like that it still excites them. Looking back, I feel lucky to have gotten a shiny Abra instead of a shiny Caterpie or Pidgey.

This may be a huge departure from my regular topics I write on but I just wanted to write about something different and one which was light hearted and easy to read. Aside from my opinions, I do enjoy playing video games (as do probably 90% of guys my age). This is just to show the different aspects of my life as well as my different interests.