Accessibility in video games is almost a requirement at this point. In AAA titles especially, developers must take care to allow players with visual and audio impairments to play the games as intended. You can look at many recent or upcoming games for examples of how to do accessibility features right. However, if you want to look at one who did them potentially wrong, you must look at Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. The game hasn’t been winning over some fans since launch due to the unrefined state that the games are in. But now, the titles are being called out over the colorations of shiny Pokemon.
According to some online, The Pokemon Company failed to indicate when a player got a shiny Pokemon. To recap, those are the ones that have different coloration and are very rare to find in the wild. The tweet below is from one who had issues with the “lack of accessibility.”
There are two sides to this coin. On the one hand, we have seen multiple online accounts of people looking at their profiles within the game and realizing that they had fought shiny Pokemon in greater numbers than they realized. That struck them as odd because usually, you can tell when you’re facing a shiny. Moreover, some even looked at some of the colorations for the shiny Pokemon compared to their base forms, and their differences are very slight.
But, on the other hand, in the thread above, multiple people said that they had no issues finding the shiny Pokemon visually or auditorily. One commenter even posted a video of them finding a Shiny Buizel, and it had a visual and auditory clue to showcase further that they had encountered a shiny.
In our run-through of the game, we met a shiny with a drastically different color scheme than the main form of the Pokemon. So what’s the deal here? Who is right in this case?
It’s hard to say. It’s possible that the gamer above had a bad experience regarding shinies and wanted to voice the issue. On the other hand, it also could be that they had a glitch that prevented some of the indicators from showing up when they battled the shinies.
We can say that Pokemon Scarlet and Violet have a unique way of helping you find shiny Pokemon. Players have noticed that in Let’s Go battles, your Pokemon will refuse to KO a shiny Pokemon they find. Or one that is either a Ditto or Zorua.
Source: Exputer
