Pokémon Legends: Z-A makes a big, welcome change for shiny hunters

Pokémon Legends: ZA wasn’t out a few hours before the tweets started pouring in: Shiny Pokémon does not disappear. You can walk away from a gloss and it will still be there when you return.

For brilliant collectors, this is big news. In others Pokémon games, like Scarlet And PurplePokémon disappear once you move away from them or trigger a loading screen. I’ve missed my fair share of shiny Pokémon this way, my heart sinking when I spotted them just before they disappeared forever.

You can still miss shiny Pokémon in Z.A.but we’ll come back to that in a moment.

I discovered the new spawn mechanics for the first time myself. I heard the sparkling sound effect that signals a glowing Swirlix and spotted a strangely colored Swirlix on top of a roof, and realized there was no way for me to get on that roof without walking very far. Not knowing any better, I figured I was just unlucky. (This Swirlix had a 1 in 4,096 chance of being shiny, so I guess I had a few chance.)

I tried to get up to the roof, but the night was about to change to day – which triggers a mini cutscene that I was sure would make the Swirlix disappear – and I was in a hurry. I tried taking a shortcut through the adjacent combat zone. However, there were plenty of trainers ready to challenge me on sight, and I immediately found myself in a battle. I’d never lost one of these battles before, so I gave it a try, thinking that maybe I’d get out of the battle and climb a ladder in time to catch the shiny Swirlix…and ended up being magically transported to a faraway Pokémon center. If the change between night and day wasn’t enough to make the Swirlix disappear, I thought, this surely would.

A little later, I was on some rooftops on my way to an objective when I heard the glowing sound effect again. I realized it was the same Swirlix, an Alpha, still there and still glowing. I immediately sent a message to my colleague Charles Pulliam-Moore, who reviewed Z.A. For The edgehalf incredulous. At first I thought it was just because the Swirlix was an Alpha, since some Alphas always appear in the same places. But after launch, players and other websites quickly reported that persistent glowing spawns applied to all shines.

There are, however, a few exceptions. Charles and I were discussing this new spawn mechanic, and he sent me a clip of a glowing Patrat he’d encountered – and barely spotted before it ran out of character and disappeared into the ether. Patrat is one of a handful of very skittish Pokémon that will flee when you get too close, and the process of fleeing do make the pokemon in question disappear, even if it is shiny.

This also applies to any shiny pokemon you defeated in battle but failed to catch, which is not good news for pokemon with lower catch rates. For those, you’ll have to rely on backup – and you can’t turn off autosave in Z.A.unlike other recent ones Pokémon games. This sounds bad, but I found that autosave doesn’t trigger too frequently until you quickly move to a new location or catch Pokémon. It should always be possible to save right before fighting a shiny and reload that save if you knock it out.

Pokémon escaping aside, the shiny new spawning mechanics are perfect for a game so heavy on roundabout, vertical, and on-foot exploration. The shiny ones to have stay in one place because reaching a pokemon to catch it isn’t always as easy as walking up to it. Sometimes you have to run around looking for a ladder, or run past lots of other people who want to fight you, or run away from a wild pokemon that’s about to knock you out. It’s a relief to know that most shiny Pokémon will be waiting for you to reach them on your own terms.