#btw i never wanna see the union room again :D LMFAOOO

[tactician]

my absolute fav mythic pokemon in its shiny forme is finally here with me - shiny manaphy from pokemon ranger!!! i named mine reides after my beloved dnd oc, who is another sea prince!!! and i'm going to try to make it a 'ribbon master' as well (prob minus a few battle tower related ribbons but We Will See), so i'll be transfering lil reides up through multiple generations. i'm starting off in pearl, where it'll be part of my official storyline team!

i definitely have a lot to say about this hunt. it was absolutely CRAZY from start to finish, by far the craziest one i've ever done, so i'm gonna slide some ramblings about it under a little cut here...!!! i’m gonna try to keep it brief but i just know i’m gonna end up writing a ton LMAO

ok! so! manaphy has actually been shiny locked in every single game that it's been featured in. the pokemon ranger manaphy is no exception to this. :( the manaphy egg that you get from pokemon ranger is specifically programmed to NEVER hatch as a shiny in the game you receive it in. but thanks to a little programming oversight, you can actually hatch a shiny one if you trade the egg that you received in one game over to another one. then you hatch the egg in that other game and it has the potential to be shiny. that's how people do this hunt: by ensnaring themselves in the union room and trading over the eggs repeatedly until one hatches shiny.

but let me tell you. getting one legitimate manaphy egg alone requires sooo much preparation. you need a copy of pokemon ranger played to the point where you can transfer the egg over (aka post-game), and you can typically only get one single manaphy egg per save file of pokemon ranger. even if you select 'new game' in your copy of ranger, the manaphy egg would always be marked as claimed. so if you look into the process of this shiny hunt, you'll find out about a method involving four copies of ranger and 'reverse hunting', wherein people shuffle the same four eggs from these copies around various gen4 games for the whole hunt, restarting their games and playing through the whole opening sequence repeatedly in the hopes that their new trainer ids will eventually match up and result in the egg hatching as a shiny. luckily, though, people eventually found out that the 'one manaphy egg per cartridge' thing is actually kind of a misconception. if you have a way of wiping that cartridge's .sav file BEYOND selecting 'new game', you can actually get as many eggs from one cartridge as you like - and, most importantly, these eggs will not be clones of each other. since i only have one copy of pokemon ranger AND i had the means of doing the .sav wipe, i decided to take this approach to the hunt. i also got really lucky because the friend who gave me his copy of pokemon ranger (SHOUTOUT TO JM) had played to the point of having the manaphy egg on the cartridge but hadn’t sent it out yet, so i didn’t have to take on the pokemon ranger plot grind at all. this was a huge motivator for me when i decided to take on the hunt bc it was just so incredibly convenient! 

at first, i started off with two systems, but at this hunt's peak i was using four (4) systems to transfer and hatch eggs. after doing that tedious back-and-forth for a good ~700 eggs (averaging at around 45 eggs per day and using up like 90% of my free time to get them - transfer speed was SLOW, to the point that i feel like doing the reverse hunting method may actually be faster), my friend cody randomly brought up the concept of rng hunting. i'd heard about rng hunting before, but it always seemed like a really convuluted process with lots of Numbers (and, y’know, Numbers Scary) - so i stayed away from it for years. but i offhandedly looked into it again and saw that a lot of people had success with it for their manaphy hunts... so i ended up looking into the process in a way more in-depth manner than before. and i'm not gonna lie... it totally gripped me. in EXTREMELY simplistic terms, rng hunters use (external) timing programs which assist them in loading into a specific seed of their game. they then advance the frames of that seed to a targeted one with a shiny, then catch that shiny. it's a process that requires a whole lot of precision - especially if you're doing it on an actual console vs on an emulator of some sort - but the more videos i watched, the more hype i was to try it for myself. not gonna lie, attempting it seemed almost fated bc the night before i had been randomly gripped by an urge to find as many of my old consoles as i could, which included my ds lite. i ended up needing to use that for the rng process, as i needed a copy of leafgreen slotted into the ds while i tried to get the right seed. the timing of that was seriously so weird. destiny fr.

anyway, there were a lot of setbacks initially - mostly because the transferred manaphy egg is received in a mart, and, in dppt, all of the marts have moving npcs which mess with your frames SO much - but after a bunch of attempts, i ended up prevailing in the end. i was pretty sure that i messed up and advanced my frames too far but i took the egg anyway, traded it over to platinum, hatched it... and there it was. a lil brave-natured shiny manaphy!

that egg was my 713th egg, and so this manaphy took 713 eggs to get home and gained another special element of being my very first successful rng-based shiny!!!

i'm really so thrilled with how it all turned out, this is definitely a shiny hunt that i won't ever forget!! i made so many crazy memories during it with friends and i feel like i know soooo much more about pokemon as a whole now. i'm super happy to have this ribbon master challenge to focus on now, too. it's what reides deserves!!! <3