The Price of Mastery

This weekend I finally completed the pokédex in PokéDoku. It took me 268 days of play to do so, and you could even shave 20-30 days off there since the dex feature wasn’t even added until I’d already been playing for a while. So that’s not too bad!

Of course, the question now is: what comes next?

Well, more PokéDoku, of course. A couple months back, shinies were added into the game. If you’re not a pokémaniac like me, shinies are pokémon that are a different colour than usual and have a 1/8192 chance of appearing. Or, that’s their odds in the real Pokémon games, anyway. In PokéDoku, there’s a 1% chance of a pokémon being shiny, which is way more likely. Still absurdly rare, but not mind-bogglingly so.

I’ve never really been a shiny hunter in any pokémon game. My very first natural shiny was a Sunkern in Pokémon Soul Silver, which was not terribly exciting. I did try to hunt another one in Pokémon Alpha Sapphire years later, but never found one. I participate in community days in Pokémon Go to take advantage of the boosted shiny odds for the pokémon highlighted on those days, but don’t really put much more effort into it than that.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I don’t really intend on trying to complete the shiny pokédex in PokéDoku. At least, that’s what I thought when the feature was first added.

Roughly a week before I finally completed the PokéDoku dex, another new feature was added: a prestige system. So now, once you’ve completed your dex, you can wipe it all and start fresh. I thought it was a silly feature, but still kind of helpful to add that extra challenge layer of not just choosing the same pokémon all the time. Then I prestiged and learned that doing so boosts your shiny odds by 25%. Which really just means that it goes from 1% to 1.25%, but hey, that’s something! And you can prestige three times, which will ultimately bump up your chance of finding a shiny pokémon to 2%. And and, when you prestige, shinies aren’t wiped from your dex, so in theory your next “run” will be easier.

It’ll still be a hella long road to the end, but I was planning to keep playing every day anyway, and at least now there’s going to be something to work toward for a good long while. PokéDoku at its core is a lot of fun, even without all that extra collection fluff, so I’m glad to open it up every day during my morning constitutional.

It’s also worth noting that I’ve only been talking about the daily mode. At some point, a separate dex was added for unlimited mode, which comes with its own shiny collection and a slightly altered prestige system. So one could conceivably sit there all day and grind out an entire pokédex if they so choose. It won’t be me (playing one puzzle a day keeps it exciting), but one could.

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