For Pokemon fans, there are few prizes quite as exciting as a newly caught Shiny. In the majority of contexts in Pokemon games, only one in several thousand Pokemon is Shiny, making these recolored variants extremely valuable. It's no surprise that any player who has a Shiny on hand is extremely proud of it—after all, they're very precious. Shiny Pokemon are such an important part of the Pokemon franchise that a whole segment of the community is dedicated to Shiny hunting, resulting in all sorts of innovative techniques that increase the chance of encountering Shiny Pokemon, like the Masuda method of breeding Pokemon.
Another method of Shiny hunting is soft or hard resetting. The name says it all: some Shiny hunters will reset their game in order to expedite the process of Shiny hunting. While Shiny resetters are certainly efficient, a lot is lost in the process of resetting. This particular way of Shiny hunting strips away the vast majority of actual Pokemon gameplay; resetting lacks the sense of adventure that Pokemon is supposed to constantly inspire. What's more, Shiny resetting lessens the value of certain in-game moments where Shinies are meant to be a rare reward. While lots of Shiny Pokemon hunting techniques are fun new ways to interact with the Pokemon world, resetting has some significant issues.
Shiny Resetting and its Flaws
Pokemon fans have practiced soft resetting as a Shiny hunting technique for many generations of the franchise. The technique is simple: when looking for Shiny Pokemon, players restart the game during encounters with normal Pokemon, rather than running through the whole encounter. Shiny resetting is particularly useful when trying to get a Shiny out of a scripted Pokemon encounter, like one with a Legendary Pokemon or with the player's starter Pokemon. In older Pokemon games on the Game Boy and Nintendo DS, players could use a certain button input to quickly reset the game without restarting the console, saving a lot of time when reentering these scripted encounters.
There's no doubting the efficiency of soft resetting for Shiny hunters. It saves a ton of time in scripted encounters, which already tend to be surrounded by cutscenes and dialogue that slow down the search for Shinies. However, a lot of the core Pokemon experience gets lost in soft resetting. The method results in players spending much more time starting and restarting the game than actually playing Pokemon. The Shiny becomes such a core objective that players can spend days or even weeks soft resetting without experiencing any of the exploration or exciting combat that Pokemon is meant to be about.
In the specific context of scripted events, soft resetting misses the intention of Shiny Pokemon being available in those contexts too. For scripted Pokemon encounters, if that monster can appear in its Shiny variant, it's meant to be a once-in-a-lifetime stroke of luck that results in a point of pride for the player that they can celebrate with the community. Repeatedly resetting the game to force a scripted Pokemon to be Shiny largely dispels the magic of those moments, turning it into something of a chore. Getting a Shiny Pokemon at the end of a long chain of resets might still be exciting, but when luck is largely removed from the occasion, there's certainly something less special about that Shiny Pokemon.
The Changing Role of Shiny Pokemon
In recent years, Game Freak has made Shiny Pokemon more accessible than ever. The Shiny Charm is a crucial item in the Shiny hunter's toolkit, significantly boosting their odds of finding Shinies once the National Pokedex or the regional Pokedex is complete, depending on the game, while events like Dynamax Adventures make Shiny Pokemon far more common. One wonders, then, if soft resetting will someday be a thing of the past; Game Freak might make Shiny versions of Legendary Pokemon, starters, and so on easier to obtain than ever. For now, it remains a far less engaging method of Shiny hunting than its peers, considering how much it diverges from the intentions of the Pokemon games.