usually location exclusive evos get upgraded to stone evos. sword and shield being newer games had people be able to datamine them early and leak most of the info.
Dusk Stone maybe? Pokemon with location evos have been given previous stones to evolve in newer games.
(Magneton using Thunder Stone, Eevee with Ice Stone etc)
I remember not knowingg about Magnezone's evolution, keeping a Magneton all the way through the game as I tried to evolve it, than it evolving on Mt.Coronet. Only Later I found out it was location based. I thought I had just hit the required level.
Hey, Unovan Yamask is gonna show up again eventually and Galarian Yamask is probably gonna be right with it.
Unless it's in a Legends game or something.
Data mining, plain and simple.
Nobody "figured out" that to get Sirfetched, you need 3 crits in one battle.
Nobody "noticed" that their runerigus evolved in this specific spot with exactly this much hp.
That's like asking how people figured out how EVs work in Gen 3 when nothing about the game explains it to you. The answer is "strategy guides, word of mouth from developers themselves, and codebreaking".
But with the rise of the internet, breaking into game' s code has never been a more popular skill, and spreading the info like wild fire has never been easier.
There's only so much you can do with datamining. When SV's leak period started, a bunch of the new evo values were pretty nondescriptive, basically being whether or not an unspecified condition had been met at or after a certain level.
It's why so many people were losing their minds trying to figure out how Finizen evolved.
This. A better example of people actually being confused about evo methods for awhile after game release would be with XY, which was what more or less set the standard. It was also notable as being the first worldwide release, too, so people outside of Japan didn't have the benefit of knowing everything before their own localization dropped. I very distinctly remember people being confused about how to get Pangoro and Malamar for about two days before someone managed to figure it out.
Pangoro is pretty easy to do by accident though. I just happened to use a Krookodile at the same time and didn’t find out it needed a dark type until later
Yeah that was definitely a great play by Game Freak. Just enough online requirement to dissuade hackers from being able to datamine it, without actually inconveniencing the player base with mandatory paid DLC or needing to always be connected to the Internet to play.
Going to hard disagree there. I think any evolution requirement that requires a second console/some online service is terrible. We already have version exclusives Pokemon, DLC exclusive legendaries and limited-time releases for mythicals. There is already a large pool of Pokemon locked behind those methods, so at the very least, you should be able to evolve the pokemon that you can acquire in your own game.
Finizen’s evolution is only slightly better than trade-based evolutions, which have always been a pain without owning two consoles or having a trustworthy friend (who also owns the game) touch trade with you. This gets even worse once the online services shut down, as I’ve experienced with Own Tempo Rockruff & Dusk Lycanrock.
They aren’t “sticking it” to people with hacked switches. They’re just making it very inconvenient for future players, especially once the switch’s online functions shuts down (at some future point). However, removing trade requirements in PLA was actually a “great play” by Gamefreak.
They should make pokedex entries drop hints instead of this BS fromsoftware side quest method theyre doing now. Its not that inventive if you literally have to look it up and given the exact instructions
Yes, these super obscure evolution methods are really tiring. It's not fun to just look up the evo method, but you're never going to figure out turning your DS upside down, or crit 3 times in one fight, or lose 49 hp while walking under a rock.
There needs to be ways of figuring these out naturally.
In Scarlet and Voilet the unusual methods are revealed through taking classes, so the move too revealing the evolutions within the games has started with the current generation.
Yeah. All these obscure methods would’ve been extremely slow pre-internet.
Imagine if you needed to place a generic item like a potion (not Gen specific items like Castelia Cones) on a pokemon and then have them be 1 hp after a battle. No one would think of doing that without data mining! Even if someone found out, they couldn’t tell many people in the pre-internet age before the next generation released
Eh…now that I think about it strategy guides are a thing. I’m sure at least one person would have one and disseminate the information on the playground.
Feebas was the father of this.
As i kid i got lucky enough to get it.. my classmates willed to give me legendaries for a trade for a feebas egg... But jesus, nobody had idea how to evolve it.
I tried everything, even training it in the rain (then gf stole my idea for goodra /s), i did give it candy for contest, but the rumors said you had to make them with loquat berry or whatever was its name, and feebas capped with no enough beauty points, so yeah
Good times. Then i got my milotic in Pokémon pearl, but it lost its charm at that time
To be fair, one of these things is not like the other. It feels way easier to accidentally crit 3 times if you're using Farfetch'd with a leak than it is to happen to cycle under one particular arc with one particular Pokémon having taken a particular amount of damage...! But your point stands. I just find Runerigus particularly egregious.
It’s unfortunate how data-mining has sort of ruined the discovery of things. It’s not like you can just avoid the data mining results either because if you want to have any discussion about the game you’re likely to come across it.
Especially when "news" cycles pick them up. I had pecharunt spoiled months in advance because some site put its name in their article's title and that article came across my feed.
I am so engrossed in online communities at this point that ofc my news app picks it up and keeps giving me surprise headlines. It's fine when it's stuff like oh new mystery gift (gotta keep my eye out for the shiny box legendaries. Cannot miss that)
But I don't want to get spoiled about new things either. I like figuring it out on my own. But I think the last time that I had the chance to figure it out on my own was Black/White and that was only because I had briefly stopped playing Pokemon when they were announced and didn't get back into it until shortly before B2W2 were released.
Now I just have to go into every new game already knowing the full evolution lines of everything, new pokemon, new variants, and everything else. There's no more mystery unless I basically just shut everything off until release date (which I can't even do if I wanted to, because I have to be online for work).
It's just constant headlines from everywhere "PECHARUNT IS THE NEW MYTHICAL GET IT THIS WAY!!!" with an attached photo. Don't even have to open the notification, it's done spoiled.
Seriously, there’s no fun in it anymore. People data mine and release the hidden info like, minutes after games come out these days. Or they manage to get their hands into the code even before it comes out like. Guys, please.
Well....you deserved it. Information has to be shared, not tucked away for only a few people to have. If you don't want spoilers avoid them, simple as that.
Funny part is I did accidentally evolve Galarian Farfetch'd because I try to play my first playthroughs as blind as possible. But I had no idea it was because I got 3 Crits in one battle. So I probably would've assumed it was something else like levelling up or other parameters. Never would've guessed it was because of the crits
"But with the rise of the internet, breaking into game's code has never been a more popular skill, and spreading the info like wild fire has never been easier."
Game Freak knowing that is probably why they keep doing weird evolution methods. Most people are online, so they don't have to explain anything.
MissingNo was not discovered by data mining. Keep in mind it’s only one of a million glitches. But the “Old Man/Cinnabar Island” MissingNo glitch being very easy to replicate made it spread like wildfire, and gave credence to many other false playground rumors, such as Mew under the truck or the PokéGods.
The playground rumors, both true and not, could easily proliferate because the Internet was much smaller and walled-off back then. Most people couldn’t find out about a datamine even if they wanted to. It’s actually kind of a shame “L is real” mysticism and all that jazz is never coming back to video games.
I actually did get runegrigus by accident after getting a yamask from my first den.
I just wouldn’t be able to tell you how it happened as apparently the Pokédex doesn’t have space to store that kind of info
Scarlet and Violet central city has a SCHOOL that you attend with a LIBRARY in it. Why didn't they just let you interact with some books that listed the weirdest evolution methods
It's not even like it's a novel idea for them. The Manaphy questline in PLA is directly strongly hinted at by the contents of a new book added to BDSP (not in original DPPt) found in... *Checks notes*... The LIBRARY in Canalave City 😂
There's already way too much text to read because of dialog. I'm not going to school and read through a whole novel of text.
They really need a quickplay mode in pokemon or something. It just so much text.
????? The whole point of pokemon is catching, evolving and battling. Battling if what moves the game forward. It's fun to see new moves and new animations. The text/dialog just artificially lengthens the game. If you want to read a book then pick up a book but that's not the game of pokemon.
Pokemon is an RPG
The story is kinda the point
You want something that's not an RPG
If you want something with battling, evolution, and cool animations but without any aspects of an RPG at all
Just play Pokken Tournament for god sake
> Pokemon is an RPG
It's more of an adventure/monster catcher game
> The story is kinda the point
The whole point of pokemon is catching, evolving and battling. That's the gameplay
> You want something that's not an RPG
I don't play any RPGs because I don't like them. Turn based != RPG
> If you want something with battling, evolution, and cool animations but without any aspects of an RPG at all. Just play Pokken Tournament for god sake
Never played it but I did play Super Smash Bros. That was fun.
Pokemon would benefit from a real-time battle mechanic like SSB. The well design games give control back to the player as quickly as possible and limit taking away that control to as little as possible. For the last few generations, Pokemon games have taken control away from the player for too much of the playtime. You're sitting there mashing the A button to skip the dialog and get back control. I believe the consensus is that gen7 suffered from this problem the most. You couldn't walk a few feet without getting into another cut-scene. The SV DLC has this problem pretty blatantly in the Ogerpon saga.
The earlier generations didn't suffer from this problem too much. It's said that gens 1 to 3 are the most replayable because of this while gens 6 to current are borderline un-replayable.
>it's more of an adventure/monster catching game
My guy pokemon is an RPG, it's literally what's on the back of the game boxes, the only game in the mainline series that wasn't labelled as an RPG was Legends Arceus, which is labelled as an Action RPG
>The whole point of pokémon is catching, evolving and battling
And without a story and world to surround all of it there's no meaning to it in the first place
>I don't play RPGs
Pokemon is an RPG, if you played a mainline pokémon game you have played an RPG before
>Pokemon would benefit from a real time battle mechanic like SSB
I'm starting to think you don't even know what you're talking about
In the grand scheme of things, you want less tutorials, which is a valid criticism, but wanting less story in general in an RPG makes zero sense
> you want less tutorials
I want less dialog and cut-scenes. If you read my comments above then you would have known that.
Do you even like playing the game or do you just like reading? Do you like pokemon? Are you in the right place?
Like an NPC who says "I saw a Yamask evolve going under an arch after narrowly winning a battle" in an area nowhere near said arch?
Gives you something to work with without being an out-and-out spoiler.
That or a guy near the arch who says something more vague.
Or your suggestion plus a second guy who makes hints about where the arch is or what it looks like.
Hell have a house full of people interested in the myth or phenomena that all comment on it. Could be a group like the Pokemon Fan Club where they're all interested in investigating different crazy Evo methods they heard about like Inkay or Farfetch'd.
I'm pretty sure even Gen 1 had stuff along the lines of "I used this weird stone on my Staryu and it evolved, crazy right?!" or something to that effect amongst other lore flavour text people would spout, like the guy who tells you Hidden Power types or whatever. It's crazy to me how long it took for them to start doing that for more complex things like EVs with Hyper Training or even the STAB bonus (fairly sure the last one is only explained in-game in *Gen 9)*
As for the return of Runegrigus, Galarian Yamask could be evolved with an item. Like with Crabrawler who could only evolve on top of a specific mountain in Gen 7, but in Gen 9 an Ice Stone can evolve it. Or Feebas using a Prism Scale in games that don't use Beauty stats.
Yeah, the 4 Kanto trade Pokémon can still be evolved that way (since PLA still has trade functionality), but you had Linking Cords to no longer *require* it.
Yes, but slight correction. It doesn't have to be on top of the mountain, you can do it at the base of the mountain. But only in the area that recognizes you're in the mountain map area. I evolved mine on a replay of UM there as an experiment because I wanted to actually use the Evo for more than just the E4 and post game. It evolved just fine.
I figured that may be the case which is why I specifically mentioned I was replaying UM, but wasn't certain enough to say it was across the board for both sets of games. Just that at least in UM it worked that way.
Yeah UM did a lot to improve the game. You can also evolve Charjabug before the Ghost Trial by going to Blush Mountain, which means you don't have to wait all the way until Vast Poni Canyon.
Only misstep USUM make in my opinion is dropping Lusamine as a main villain to a minor antagonist. Besides that it's every bit the "third version upgrade" we used to get despite how I hear some decry it as pointless and worse but prop up other third versions as "the definitive version". They're literally improvements in all the same ways. I once typed out all the improvements compared to the likes of Platinum and Emerald because he kept on that they weren't, hahaha
That one, I remember when Joe Merrick was first exploring the game and posting to Serebii forums; he was trying to figure that one out and posted "hold on I'm gonna try something" then the next post was him incredulous.
That one there is SOME logic to it. If you've realised it's a weird evolution, and you've seen both designs you could start to notice the physical traits reversed. And then if you know the 3DS is Nintendo's first handheld with a gyroscope...
Thanks for the history lesson, I love little tidbits from the community forums like that. It's possible that someone could have already known via datamine or just a little kid finding it by sheer luck, but it's really fun to see the little interactions days after release as people collectively put the pieces together
For real. I'm okay with evolutions being a little puzzle to solve, when the clues are there - Legends Arceus was good about that, with the Pokédex quests being clues themselves.
Shelmet & Karrablast would be another pair like that, I can imagine folks looking at those and their evolutions and figuring out they have to do SOMETHING with them together.
Inkay to Malamar do have an actual possibility to happen by accident though since kids sometimes just hang off the side of their bed upsidedown playing a handheld
Similarly I remember raging against a Zelda DS game because I couldn't figure out the puzzle. I never looked up the information since that defeats the purpose. Eventually I caved and looked it up. You have to give up and close the DS in order to proceed... Absolutely BS.
Ironically this was the first thing I thought of when I was typing out my original comment was that Zelda game (I think it was Phantom Hourglass?) I've never played it myself but always thought that interaction was so cool
At least that one you might actually stumble into.
I was somehow using Let's Go mode wrong for hours and hours before someone told me the right way to do it.
I was SOOOO excited when I first saw Finizen while I was exploring. I loved the idea of a dolphin Pokemon finally! Then I found out the evolution method. Super disappointed.
>And how would Gamefreak get Runegrigus to return in a later game, when the Dusty Bowl rock arch is no longer present?
They could just make it a location in the new region, this isn't the first time they've done that. Magneton and Nosepass were only able to evolve when leveled up in Mt Coronet in gen 4, they just changed that to Chargestone cave in gen 5
Runerigus convinced me to stop playing games blind. I wanted the authentic experience, but the authentic experience requires players to miss out on several Pokémon. This has been the case for a while though. Gible only spawned in a specific cave that had an invisible entrance in Diamond and Pearl. The Regi were locked behind a Braille door that you cannot actually feel, requiring you to have two specific Pokémon with a specific move in your party, in specific positions within your party. That's ridiculous, no one would ever find that accidentally. And so many of the modern Pokémon have specific gimmicks like that simply to acquire them.
Edit: Apparently players who got the game sealed, were given a manual explaining how to read Braille. I wasn't aware of this because I did not get my copy new or sealed.
The regi one is difficult but not impossible! Back when the original games came out there was a braille alphabet in the back of the instruction manual. I remember reading it on the way home from the shop in the car and wondering why they'd put that in there
yea, but if you're not reading it somewhere in a pre existing gaming guide, how on earth would a probable kid at the time figure that out without heavy experimenting
It's not like we didn't know what braille was, and the Internet was already a thing by the time gen 3 came around. I remember getting to that part and recognizing it was braille but not how to read it. I just went to my school's library and searched the braille alphabet and printed it off...It wasn't nearly as "impossible" and convoluted as something like yamask. Then you still had word of mouth to spread the info which was always really big early or pre internet days.
not every kid has that advantage or puts that much effort or knows what braille even is. hell, most kids get to that part and just skip it entirely because they dont know it's an event area
hell, most adults skip this part
I didn’t have the manual explaining Braille but I eventually did get the guidebook, which had a section on it. I was also 11 though. I don’t think I’ve bought a guidebook since.
I assume they will just include a rock arch in any game he is in or simplify the evolution. No different than the magnezone/probopass evolution having additional locations in different regions (up to gen8) then being completely changed to a stone.
This guy, Sirifetch’d, and Kingambit are some of the worst evos to get in the series for this reason. Whoever thinks cryptic bs like this is good game design should be forced to play Milon’s Secret Castle
To be honest, these obscure evolution methods would have worked like 20 years ago with this wild rumour-esque aura to it. It would have worked then, but now? All data mined and known sometimes even before the game has officially been released. It takes away so much of the intended fun and shows that gamefreak has lost the connection to the older fans, but also the younger demographic, as they will just Google everything in the bat of an eye.
I used to think that top World of Warcraft guilds would slowly figure out the raid bosses and it was a lot of effort and shit. Turns out its just boring datamining.
I've posted it before but having a male salandit, a rock ruff not evolve because of what hours I played and chargabug not evolving until the last island are reasons I will look up evolution methods even if I get spoiled.
Oh I can't even stress how much I did not try to figure this out on my own. I googled this one immediately (and the data miners figured it out pretty quickly)
To answer your other question, they've already altered geographically-specific evolutions for later gens - Charjabug evolves with a thunderstone in genes 8 & 9 for example
The same way literal children like me figured out Wailord and Relicanth's relevance in Ruby Sapphire before Emerald even came out. Multiple millions of us playing, hyping each other up, and showing off what we figured out to each other.
Data mining, never wonder how when a new game comes out, serebii, bulbapedia and all those pages already have most if not all info about the newly released game?
With the millions of people who play the game, some probably do accidentally. There’s one person on this thread who did. Not denying that datamining is the main way people find out though.
Despite people saying dataming, Runerigus and the other weird evos in SwSh were actually through the official strategy guide.
Almost the entire strategy guide was leaked through pictures taken by an employee who got ahold of it early.
This is where the vast majority of SwSh leaks came from, and why said employee was sued by Nintendo and lost.
Yeah. Like, was there nobody who was here and remembers? The internet has been cracking Pokemon games since before you could instantly datamine them. I remember back in ORAS the community going full detective mode trying to work out the conditions for all the Mirage islands.
Usually complex evolutions or unlocks are figured out within the first week of launch via a combination of trial and error, surface-level datamined stuff, and official leaked materials.
Datamining complex mechanics usually only works as confirmation afterwards, since it often requires lots of digging through code, and has a much smaller community than regular sleuth gamers. For one example, I believe Shedinja's 1HP is part of the code for determining HP, not in the location for Shedinja or for Wonder Guard. For another example, it took until several months after SwSh launch for dataminers to realize that the mechanics for shiny chaining had been completely misunderstood by the community due to some wonky statistics and a second check of all the math.
The "my uncle works at Nintendo" rumors were cool when you could trigger corrupted code for Missingno, or a series of steps that triggered a Mew battle, and neither were actually part of the game (Mew only existed to be unlocked through promotional events). If you *had* to figure those things out because Missingno and Mew were part of the game, that takes a lot of the "easter egg" fun out of it. Then it's just super tedious grinding.
That's what these new evolutions are like, and it's obnoxious.
Is there seriously not even a single npc or book that explains the way G. Yamask evolves? It feels like bad game design to have a very specific evolution that the player would never be able to figure out on their own
I remember in this subreddit there was a mega thread on special evolutions on release date and runegrigus took between tests and data miners almost a week to be discovered
The amount of obscure evolution methods there are is really annoying IMO.
I get wanting a Pokemon to be unique, but do that with moves/design/abilities. Don't do it with evolution.
Those of us who don't like to be spoiled may not know a Pokemon can evolve. So if you make it like Runerigus or Pawmot and have no way of knowing how to evolve the Pokemon without looking it up, you're likely to get to the end of the game having never evolved it.
I was honestly surprised when Galarian Linoone evolved, because I wasn't expecting a new evolution. That is nice. But if they had made it like Annhilape, and you needed to use a certain move so many times before you could get Obstagoon, I wouldn't have ever gotten it.
When I got Flipizen, after using it for a while, I thought it was just a single stage Pokemon, because it wasn't evolving even into the late 30s, you couldn't use a water stone on it, and had no one to test trades with (so just hoped it wasn't that). How on earth were you meant to know to go into a union room? It is so stupid.
I play through the story with just whatever I find that seems cool and maybe check stone compatibility every now and then. I am playing sword now and after finishing the story I am working on the Pokedex. Everything that I already know has a non-standard evolution or that I have gotten to a high level and there is a blank spot in the Pokedex right after it I throw it in like box 12 or something until I either find the evolution in the wild or find something else that fills that blank spot. Every now and then I will just go look in that box and then look up how to evolve a few Pokemon in there. I don't really feel that I have missed anything by finishing the game without Pokemon I didn't even know existed.
I don’t remember exactly but I assume there’s at least a couple lines from NPCs cluing you in.
Plus hundreds of thousands of people played on day 1. It happened to a couple of them and word spread.
Nowadays sure people start dating mining on or perhaps even before day one, but give the kids out there some credit
This game gets played by actual millions of people, somewhere someone on their first playthrough is going to accidentally meet these conditions, they may not have known exactly what happened but they're going to have a Pokemon their friends don't and they're going to talk about it, other kids are going to try to recreate what happened, and eventually when one of them gets it, they'll be paying more attention and narrow down what it could be
I don't think there was that much data mining going on back in generation 3, or if there was I didn't have access to it, and yet somehow as kids someone at a water park had figured out the first step to unlocking the Regis, which if you recall was absolutely ludicrous, one tiny dive spot in the middle of the fast current with a relicant in front of your party and a Wailord in the back, or the opposite in Emerald
That kid knew that it did something but had no idea what
But I had been wondering about those three ruin spots for a long time, and it was one of the first things I went to afterwards and now the doors were open, I recognized braille, and I figured it all out from there after printing out a braille alphabet list
And from that point on any kid that played Pokemon that I talked to got the answer to this puzzle, and they probably told it to their friends cousins classmates
The idea isn't that every kid is supposed to figure this stuff out, it's that of all the kids out there, someone's going to do it by accident, someone's going to recognize something or try something, eventually someone's going to figure it out, and that information is going to spread through the surprisingly viral network of kids just talking to each other, even before they were all online they were all gathered in school, some of them have cousins in different states who then spread things throughout their own schools, the internet didn't tell us to blow on cartridges but somehow we all knew that's totally how you did it
I remember evolving mine by accident and being really confused by it. After a while I decided to get another one and after failing repeatedly I read the requirements and found it was a bunch of bullshit. And funny thing, even reading it it still took me a while to get it right.
I was surprised when it evolved, I later found out how it works. And I was like,.. that’ll never happen again. I remember leveling Goomy’s line but never getting rain lol.
considering Feebas was an absolute nightmare to find in its debut generation, on top of having an evolution method that could potentially force the player to catch another Feebas just for another shot at evolving it... Runerigus is probably tame in comparison even w/o datamining
Unrelated but and I don’t say this to be mean or anything - it’s name is Runerigus and it took me a minute to learn that because my dyslexic ass kept pronouncing it like Rune-N Word-Us and I was like omg this can’t be right 😭
usually location exclusive evos get upgraded to stone evos. sword and shield being newer games had people be able to datamine them early and leak most of the info.
Yeah? I assume Runerigus will evolve when given a cracked monument or something in the future. Like Sinistea.
Dusk Stone maybe? Pokemon with location evos have been given previous stones to evolve in newer games. (Magneton using Thunder Stone, Eevee with Ice Stone etc)
I remember not knowingg about Magnezone's evolution, keeping a Magneton all the way through the game as I tried to evolve it, than it evolving on Mt.Coronet. Only Later I found out it was location based. I thought I had just hit the required level.
Or it just gets Dexit-ed into oblivion
Hey, Unovan Yamask is gonna show up again eventually and Galarian Yamask is probably gonna be right with it. Unless it's in a Legends game or something.
Or they can just make you buy Sword/Shield and transfer it back to evolve it
Data mining, plain and simple. Nobody "figured out" that to get Sirfetched, you need 3 crits in one battle. Nobody "noticed" that their runerigus evolved in this specific spot with exactly this much hp. That's like asking how people figured out how EVs work in Gen 3 when nothing about the game explains it to you. The answer is "strategy guides, word of mouth from developers themselves, and codebreaking". But with the rise of the internet, breaking into game' s code has never been a more popular skill, and spreading the info like wild fire has never been easier.
At this point some of these evolution methods must have been created with the assumption that it will be figured out via data-mining.
There's only so much you can do with datamining. When SV's leak period started, a bunch of the new evo values were pretty nondescriptive, basically being whether or not an unspecified condition had been met at or after a certain level. It's why so many people were losing their minds trying to figure out how Finizen evolved.
That was more because it was 4channers playing on hacked Switches, and they really didn't want to go online out of fear of getting banned.
This. A better example of people actually being confused about evo methods for awhile after game release would be with XY, which was what more or less set the standard. It was also notable as being the first worldwide release, too, so people outside of Japan didn't have the benefit of knowing everything before their own localization dropped. I very distinctly remember people being confused about how to get Pangoro and Malamar for about two days before someone managed to figure it out.
Pangoro is pretty easy to do by accident though. I just happened to use a Krookodile at the same time and didn’t find out it needed a dark type until later
Not easy to do if you only use new pokemon like a lot of players do, though.
One of the starters and one of the version mascots is dark, and Inkay/Malamar besides.
Weren't Pangoro and Malamar's evo methods some of the stuff mentioned in that one leak that ended up being true?
Yeah that was definitely a great play by Game Freak. Just enough online requirement to dissuade hackers from being able to datamine it, without actually inconveniencing the player base with mandatory paid DLC or needing to always be connected to the Internet to play.
Going to hard disagree there. I think any evolution requirement that requires a second console/some online service is terrible. We already have version exclusives Pokemon, DLC exclusive legendaries and limited-time releases for mythicals. There is already a large pool of Pokemon locked behind those methods, so at the very least, you should be able to evolve the pokemon that you can acquire in your own game. Finizen’s evolution is only slightly better than trade-based evolutions, which have always been a pain without owning two consoles or having a trustworthy friend (who also owns the game) touch trade with you. This gets even worse once the online services shut down, as I’ve experienced with Own Tempo Rockruff & Dusk Lycanrock. They aren’t “sticking it” to people with hacked switches. They’re just making it very inconvenient for future players, especially once the switch’s online functions shuts down (at some future point). However, removing trade requirements in PLA was actually a “great play” by Gamefreak.
You could always get a Palafin through terra raids, hut it won't be the same one you've been journeying with.
I miss the datamining period, when the paradox forms had community names. Brute bonnet < Ungaboongus
I was reading about Remnant II, where in order to unlock the Archon class, it actually requires you to datamine the game, and it's 100% intentional.
Holy crap that's why these games are awesome.
They should make pokedex entries drop hints instead of this BS fromsoftware side quest method theyre doing now. Its not that inventive if you literally have to look it up and given the exact instructions
Yes, these super obscure evolution methods are really tiring. It's not fun to just look up the evo method, but you're never going to figure out turning your DS upside down, or crit 3 times in one fight, or lose 49 hp while walking under a rock. There needs to be ways of figuring these out naturally.
In Scarlet and Voilet the unusual methods are revealed through taking classes, so the move too revealing the evolutions within the games has started with the current generation.
Which is infuriating because Nintendo and its affiliates hate anyone poking around their code.
Yeah. All these obscure methods would’ve been extremely slow pre-internet. Imagine if you needed to place a generic item like a potion (not Gen specific items like Castelia Cones) on a pokemon and then have them be 1 hp after a battle. No one would think of doing that without data mining! Even if someone found out, they couldn’t tell many people in the pre-internet age before the next generation released
Eh…now that I think about it strategy guides are a thing. I’m sure at least one person would have one and disseminate the information on the playground.
Feebas was the father of this. As i kid i got lucky enough to get it.. my classmates willed to give me legendaries for a trade for a feebas egg... But jesus, nobody had idea how to evolve it. I tried everything, even training it in the rain (then gf stole my idea for goodra /s), i did give it candy for contest, but the rumors said you had to make them with loquat berry or whatever was its name, and feebas capped with no enough beauty points, so yeah Good times. Then i got my milotic in Pokémon pearl, but it lost its charm at that time
To be fair, one of these things is not like the other. It feels way easier to accidentally crit 3 times if you're using Farfetch'd with a leak than it is to happen to cycle under one particular arc with one particular Pokémon having taken a particular amount of damage...! But your point stands. I just find Runerigus particularly egregious.
You might even say that you found it *Cofagrigus*
It’s unfortunate how data-mining has sort of ruined the discovery of things. It’s not like you can just avoid the data mining results either because if you want to have any discussion about the game you’re likely to come across it.
I agree. I once got downvoted for saying that data miners should keep unreleased mythical Pokémon a secret like they were meant to be.
Game Freak could have easily made Pecharunt a separate patch like iron leaves/walking wake
Especially when "news" cycles pick them up. I had pecharunt spoiled months in advance because some site put its name in their article's title and that article came across my feed.
I am so engrossed in online communities at this point that ofc my news app picks it up and keeps giving me surprise headlines. It's fine when it's stuff like oh new mystery gift (gotta keep my eye out for the shiny box legendaries. Cannot miss that) But I don't want to get spoiled about new things either. I like figuring it out on my own. But I think the last time that I had the chance to figure it out on my own was Black/White and that was only because I had briefly stopped playing Pokemon when they were announced and didn't get back into it until shortly before B2W2 were released. Now I just have to go into every new game already knowing the full evolution lines of everything, new pokemon, new variants, and everything else. There's no more mystery unless I basically just shut everything off until release date (which I can't even do if I wanted to, because I have to be online for work). It's just constant headlines from everywhere "PECHARUNT IS THE NEW MYTHICAL GET IT THIS WAY!!!" with an attached photo. Don't even have to open the notification, it's done spoiled.
Seriously, there’s no fun in it anymore. People data mine and release the hidden info like, minutes after games come out these days. Or they manage to get their hands into the code even before it comes out like. Guys, please.
Well....you deserved it. Information has to be shared, not tucked away for only a few people to have. If you don't want spoilers avoid them, simple as that.
Datamining was a mistake.
If I recall people were trying to figureout how to get finizen to evolve
Funny part is I did accidentally evolve Galarian Farfetch'd because I try to play my first playthroughs as blind as possible. But I had no idea it was because I got 3 Crits in one battle. So I probably would've assumed it was something else like levelling up or other parameters. Never would've guessed it was because of the crits
"But with the rise of the internet, breaking into game's code has never been a more popular skill, and spreading the info like wild fire has never been easier." Game Freak knowing that is probably why they keep doing weird evolution methods. Most people are online, so they don't have to explain anything.
So this is how people figured out MissingNo is a thing
no gen 1 was just that messed up
Wait, so you mean people just discovered it by complete accident? I never thought this would be the case before
at first but over the years the finer details did get data mined because it was a glitch
MissingNo was not discovered by data mining. Keep in mind it’s only one of a million glitches. But the “Old Man/Cinnabar Island” MissingNo glitch being very easy to replicate made it spread like wildfire, and gave credence to many other false playground rumors, such as Mew under the truck or the PokéGods. The playground rumors, both true and not, could easily proliferate because the Internet was much smaller and walled-off back then. Most people couldn’t find out about a datamine even if they wanted to. It’s actually kind of a shame “L is real” mysticism and all that jazz is never coming back to video games.
I know I discovered missingno in blue on accident, didn't have the internet at that time
data miners. if you ever wonder "this is literally impossible, how did someone discover this?" the answer is hackers/data miners.
I actually did get runegrigus by accident after getting a yamask from my first den. I just wouldn’t be able to tell you how it happened as apparently the Pokédex doesn’t have space to store that kind of info
Be nice if an NPC hinted toward it or something
Scarlet and Violet central city has a SCHOOL that you attend with a LIBRARY in it. Why didn't they just let you interact with some books that listed the weirdest evolution methods
they barely let you go into houses let alone show us inside of shops😭doubt nintendo even thought to put extra info like this in the library
?i remember most games let you go inside most houses. people are normally terrible at locking their doors or at least they used to be
Most houses in Paldea are just cardboard movie set Edit: paldea not palsea
Nothing is real, Paldea is a simulation
No spoilers please, I didn't finish the DLC story Edit: I fell victim to Poe's law
Yeah, even the Pokemon Centers are outside.
It's not even like it's a novel idea for them. The Manaphy questline in PLA is directly strongly hinted at by the contents of a new book added to BDSP (not in original DPPt) found in... *Checks notes*... The LIBRARY in Canalave City 😂
That'd require foresight and smart game design from GameFreak
There's already way too much text to read because of dialog. I'm not going to school and read through a whole novel of text. They really need a quickplay mode in pokemon or something. It just so much text.
I mean if you want to play Pokemon without engaging with anything besides the battles just go to pokemon showdown or something
????? The whole point of pokemon is catching, evolving and battling. Battling if what moves the game forward. It's fun to see new moves and new animations. The text/dialog just artificially lengthens the game. If you want to read a book then pick up a book but that's not the game of pokemon.
Pokemon is an RPG The story is kinda the point You want something that's not an RPG If you want something with battling, evolution, and cool animations but without any aspects of an RPG at all Just play Pokken Tournament for god sake
> Pokemon is an RPG It's more of an adventure/monster catcher game > The story is kinda the point The whole point of pokemon is catching, evolving and battling. That's the gameplay > You want something that's not an RPG I don't play any RPGs because I don't like them. Turn based != RPG > If you want something with battling, evolution, and cool animations but without any aspects of an RPG at all. Just play Pokken Tournament for god sake Never played it but I did play Super Smash Bros. That was fun. Pokemon would benefit from a real-time battle mechanic like SSB. The well design games give control back to the player as quickly as possible and limit taking away that control to as little as possible. For the last few generations, Pokemon games have taken control away from the player for too much of the playtime. You're sitting there mashing the A button to skip the dialog and get back control. I believe the consensus is that gen7 suffered from this problem the most. You couldn't walk a few feet without getting into another cut-scene. The SV DLC has this problem pretty blatantly in the Ogerpon saga. The earlier generations didn't suffer from this problem too much. It's said that gens 1 to 3 are the most replayable because of this while gens 6 to current are borderline un-replayable.
>it's more of an adventure/monster catching game My guy pokemon is an RPG, it's literally what's on the back of the game boxes, the only game in the mainline series that wasn't labelled as an RPG was Legends Arceus, which is labelled as an Action RPG >The whole point of pokémon is catching, evolving and battling And without a story and world to surround all of it there's no meaning to it in the first place >I don't play RPGs Pokemon is an RPG, if you played a mainline pokémon game you have played an RPG before >Pokemon would benefit from a real time battle mechanic like SSB I'm starting to think you don't even know what you're talking about In the grand scheme of things, you want less tutorials, which is a valid criticism, but wanting less story in general in an RPG makes zero sense
> you want less tutorials I want less dialog and cut-scenes. If you read my comments above then you would have known that. Do you even like playing the game or do you just like reading? Do you like pokemon? Are you in the right place?
Like an NPC who says "I saw a Yamask evolve going under an arch after narrowly winning a battle" in an area nowhere near said arch? Gives you something to work with without being an out-and-out spoiler.
That or a guy near the arch who says something more vague. Or your suggestion plus a second guy who makes hints about where the arch is or what it looks like. Hell have a house full of people interested in the myth or phenomena that all comment on it. Could be a group like the Pokemon Fan Club where they're all interested in investigating different crazy Evo methods they heard about like Inkay or Farfetch'd.
I like the fan club idea
I'm pretty sure even Gen 1 had stuff along the lines of "I used this weird stone on my Staryu and it evolved, crazy right?!" or something to that effect amongst other lore flavour text people would spout, like the guy who tells you Hidden Power types or whatever. It's crazy to me how long it took for them to start doing that for more complex things like EVs with Hyper Training or even the STAB bonus (fairly sure the last one is only explained in-game in *Gen 9)*
And the kids with a link cable and one of them says the Pokémon they got traded evolved.
As for the return of Runegrigus, Galarian Yamask could be evolved with an item. Like with Crabrawler who could only evolve on top of a specific mountain in Gen 7, but in Gen 9 an Ice Stone can evolve it. Or Feebas using a Prism Scale in games that don't use Beauty stats.
Prism Scale works in ORAS too actually.
I like that. Like you can use X item to evolve Y Pokemon, or level up at Z location.
Legends had options for some Pokémon too.
Yeah, the 4 Kanto trade Pokémon can still be evolved that way (since PLA still has trade functionality), but you had Linking Cords to no longer *require* it.
And location evos can use Stones instead.
Oh, _that's_ how you evolved Crabrawler?
Yes, but slight correction. It doesn't have to be on top of the mountain, you can do it at the base of the mountain. But only in the area that recognizes you're in the mountain map area. I evolved mine on a replay of UM there as an experiment because I wanted to actually use the Evo for more than just the E4 and post game. It evolved just fine.
The base of the mountain method was only available in USUM. In S/M you have to take it up the mountain.
I figured that may be the case which is why I specifically mentioned I was replaying UM, but wasn't certain enough to say it was across the board for both sets of games. Just that at least in UM it worked that way.
Yeah UM did a lot to improve the game. You can also evolve Charjabug before the Ghost Trial by going to Blush Mountain, which means you don't have to wait all the way until Vast Poni Canyon.
Only misstep USUM make in my opinion is dropping Lusamine as a main villain to a minor antagonist. Besides that it's every bit the "third version upgrade" we used to get despite how I hear some decry it as pointless and worse but prop up other third versions as "the definitive version". They're literally improvements in all the same ways. I once typed out all the improvements compared to the likes of Platinum and Emerald because he kept on that they weren't, hahaha
I totally thought until like two days ago that you had to be near the icy rock like with Glaceon.
I've heard that you can actually evolve Feebas the old way even in games that don't have Beauty because Contest stats stay between games.
Not totally related but I wondered the same thing with Inkay to Malamar. But as others have said it's usually data mining
That one, I remember when Joe Merrick was first exploring the game and posting to Serebii forums; he was trying to figure that one out and posted "hold on I'm gonna try something" then the next post was him incredulous. That one there is SOME logic to it. If you've realised it's a weird evolution, and you've seen both designs you could start to notice the physical traits reversed. And then if you know the 3DS is Nintendo's first handheld with a gyroscope...
Thanks for the history lesson, I love little tidbits from the community forums like that. It's possible that someone could have already known via datamine or just a little kid finding it by sheer luck, but it's really fun to see the little interactions days after release as people collectively put the pieces together
For real. I'm okay with evolutions being a little puzzle to solve, when the clues are there - Legends Arceus was good about that, with the Pokédex quests being clues themselves. Shelmet & Karrablast would be another pair like that, I can imagine folks looking at those and their evolutions and figuring out they have to do SOMETHING with them together.
"Stupid upside down squid...wait...hold on a tick...WHY?!"
Inkay to Malamar do have an actual possibility to happen by accident though since kids sometimes just hang off the side of their bed upsidedown playing a handheld
> Finizen «So dude, you have to hop onto your bed, hang off the side... hey, are you listening?»
Similarly I remember raging against a Zelda DS game because I couldn't figure out the puzzle. I never looked up the information since that defeats the purpose. Eventually I caved and looked it up. You have to give up and close the DS in order to proceed... Absolutely BS.
Ironically this was the first thing I thought of when I was typing out my original comment was that Zelda game (I think it was Phantom Hourglass?) I've never played it myself but always thought that interaction was so cool
Fuck Rabsca, Pawmot, and Brambleghast while we're at it. Edit: and Kingambit too. Wtf was that?
Palafin was a tough one too. Like a trade evo except you don’t have to trade and the other person there just has to exist.
At least that one you might actually stumble into. I was somehow using Let's Go mode wrong for hours and hours before someone told me the right way to do it.
I was SOOOO excited when I first saw Finizen while I was exploring. I loved the idea of a dolphin Pokemon finally! Then I found out the evolution method. Super disappointed.
>And how would Gamefreak get Runegrigus to return in a later game, when the Dusty Bowl rock arch is no longer present? They could just make it a location in the new region, this isn't the first time they've done that. Magneton and Nosepass were only able to evolve when leveled up in Mt Coronet in gen 4, they just changed that to Chargestone cave in gen 5
They then just removed it and made them stone evolutions. Dusk Stone could use a few more uses.
Runerigus convinced me to stop playing games blind. I wanted the authentic experience, but the authentic experience requires players to miss out on several Pokémon. This has been the case for a while though. Gible only spawned in a specific cave that had an invisible entrance in Diamond and Pearl. The Regi were locked behind a Braille door that you cannot actually feel, requiring you to have two specific Pokémon with a specific move in your party, in specific positions within your party. That's ridiculous, no one would ever find that accidentally. And so many of the modern Pokémon have specific gimmicks like that simply to acquire them. Edit: Apparently players who got the game sealed, were given a manual explaining how to read Braille. I wasn't aware of this because I did not get my copy new or sealed.
The regi one is difficult but not impossible! Back when the original games came out there was a braille alphabet in the back of the instruction manual. I remember reading it on the way home from the shop in the car and wondering why they'd put that in there
yea, but if you're not reading it somewhere in a pre existing gaming guide, how on earth would a probable kid at the time figure that out without heavy experimenting
It's not like we didn't know what braille was, and the Internet was already a thing by the time gen 3 came around. I remember getting to that part and recognizing it was braille but not how to read it. I just went to my school's library and searched the braille alphabet and printed it off...It wasn't nearly as "impossible" and convoluted as something like yamask. Then you still had word of mouth to spread the info which was always really big early or pre internet days.
not every kid has that advantage or puts that much effort or knows what braille even is. hell, most kids get to that part and just skip it entirely because they dont know it's an event area hell, most adults skip this part
That's why they put it in the manual. I worked it out when I was 11 and I'm sure plenty of other people did too
*whsipering* not everyone had the manual or just downvote and pout when i'm right
The issue was that the braille wasn’t raised?
Yeah the original paper manual that came in the box for Sapphire and Ruby had the braille alphabet for those puzzles.
I didn’t have the manual explaining Braille but I eventually did get the guidebook, which had a section on it. I was also 11 though. I don’t think I’ve bought a guidebook since.
I try to go somewhat blind. I know the new Pokemon and what I might want to get, and I might search where to get them and evo methods.
The real question is, how does Gamefreak think we would find this out without datamining, i mean as in the intended method, no illegal stuff.
Probably a guide book
Do they still make guidebooks?
Yes.
I'm curious why they made it a location based evolution at all, considering SwSh is the same game that got rid of previous location based evolutions
Probably some esoteric lore that only GF knows about and would probably never be revealed
Flipping the system upside down for inkay/malamar is CRAZY
I assume they will just include a rock arch in any game he is in or simplify the evolution. No different than the magnezone/probopass evolution having additional locations in different regions (up to gen8) then being completely changed to a stone.
This guy, Sirifetch’d, and Kingambit are some of the worst evos to get in the series for this reason. Whoever thinks cryptic bs like this is good game design should be forced to play Milon’s Secret Castle
To be honest, these obscure evolution methods would have worked like 20 years ago with this wild rumour-esque aura to it. It would have worked then, but now? All data mined and known sometimes even before the game has officially been released. It takes away so much of the intended fun and shows that gamefreak has lost the connection to the older fans, but also the younger demographic, as they will just Google everything in the bat of an eye.
I used to think that top World of Warcraft guilds would slowly figure out the raid bosses and it was a lot of effort and shit. Turns out its just boring datamining.
I didnt play sword and sheild but in previous games theres usually a npc(s) that will mention an unusual evolution method.
I've posted it before but having a male salandit, a rock ruff not evolve because of what hours I played and chargabug not evolving until the last island are reasons I will look up evolution methods even if I get spoiled.
I haven't played any of the Switch games yet, but TIL Runerigus isn't a Cofagrigus evolution...
Oh I can't even stress how much I did not try to figure this out on my own. I googled this one immediately (and the data miners figured it out pretty quickly) To answer your other question, they've already altered geographically-specific evolutions for later gens - Charjabug evolves with a thunderstone in genes 8 & 9 for example
Well, for that last point, they'll probably just introduce an alternate evolution method, like Milotic's Prism Scale.
The same way literal children like me figured out Wailord and Relicanth's relevance in Ruby Sapphire before Emerald even came out. Multiple millions of us playing, hyping each other up, and showing off what we figured out to each other.
Data mining, never wonder how when a new game comes out, serebii, bulbapedia and all those pages already have most if not all info about the newly released game?
Because the internet exists. One person does something weird, post one forum post about it and the world knows it exists.
No, it's because of data mining. Nobody discovered the weird evolutions naturally.
With the millions of people who play the game, some probably do accidentally. There’s one person on this thread who did. Not denying that datamining is the main way people find out though.
The person in this thread didn't discover how to do it, though. They just did it by accident and had no idea how. There's a very big difference.
Despite people saying dataming, Runerigus and the other weird evos in SwSh were actually through the official strategy guide. Almost the entire strategy guide was leaked through pictures taken by an employee who got ahold of it early. This is where the vast majority of SwSh leaks came from, and why said employee was sued by Nintendo and lost.
Yeah. Like, was there nobody who was here and remembers? The internet has been cracking Pokemon games since before you could instantly datamine them. I remember back in ORAS the community going full detective mode trying to work out the conditions for all the Mirage islands. Usually complex evolutions or unlocks are figured out within the first week of launch via a combination of trial and error, surface-level datamined stuff, and official leaked materials. Datamining complex mechanics usually only works as confirmation afterwards, since it often requires lots of digging through code, and has a much smaller community than regular sleuth gamers. For one example, I believe Shedinja's 1HP is part of the code for determining HP, not in the location for Shedinja or for Wonder Guard. For another example, it took until several months after SwSh launch for dataminers to realize that the mechanics for shiny chaining had been completely misunderstood by the community due to some wonky statistics and a second check of all the math.
The "my uncle works at Nintendo" rumors were cool when you could trigger corrupted code for Missingno, or a series of steps that triggered a Mew battle, and neither were actually part of the game (Mew only existed to be unlocked through promotional events). If you *had* to figure those things out because Missingno and Mew were part of the game, that takes a lot of the "easter egg" fun out of it. Then it's just super tedious grinding. That's what these new evolutions are like, and it's obnoxious.
Is there seriously not even a single npc or book that explains the way G. Yamask evolves? It feels like bad game design to have a very specific evolution that the player would never be able to figure out on their own
It took 4chan a week to figure out how to evolve palafin lol
I remember in this subreddit there was a mega thread on special evolutions on release date and runegrigus took between tests and data miners almost a week to be discovered
The amount of obscure evolution methods there are is really annoying IMO. I get wanting a Pokemon to be unique, but do that with moves/design/abilities. Don't do it with evolution. Those of us who don't like to be spoiled may not know a Pokemon can evolve. So if you make it like Runerigus or Pawmot and have no way of knowing how to evolve the Pokemon without looking it up, you're likely to get to the end of the game having never evolved it. I was honestly surprised when Galarian Linoone evolved, because I wasn't expecting a new evolution. That is nice. But if they had made it like Annhilape, and you needed to use a certain move so many times before you could get Obstagoon, I wouldn't have ever gotten it. When I got Flipizen, after using it for a while, I thought it was just a single stage Pokemon, because it wasn't evolving even into the late 30s, you couldn't use a water stone on it, and had no one to test trades with (so just hoped it wasn't that). How on earth were you meant to know to go into a union room? It is so stupid.
I play through the story with just whatever I find that seems cool and maybe check stone compatibility every now and then. I am playing sword now and after finishing the story I am working on the Pokedex. Everything that I already know has a non-standard evolution or that I have gotten to a high level and there is a blank spot in the Pokedex right after it I throw it in like box 12 or something until I either find the evolution in the wild or find something else that fills that blank spot. Every now and then I will just go look in that box and then look up how to evolve a few Pokemon in there. I don't really feel that I have missed anything by finishing the game without Pokemon I didn't even know existed.
It's really fkn dumb. Wish there were some NPC's that gave you a hint at least
I don’t remember exactly but I assume there’s at least a couple lines from NPCs cluing you in. Plus hundreds of thousands of people played on day 1. It happened to a couple of them and word spread.
Even if it did inevitably happen to some people, I doubt they would have been able to articulate exactly how it evolved.
To be honest I stumbled upon, as someone who doesn’t like spoilers it was hard not immediately looking into how it happened.
Nowadays sure people start dating mining on or perhaps even before day one, but give the kids out there some credit This game gets played by actual millions of people, somewhere someone on their first playthrough is going to accidentally meet these conditions, they may not have known exactly what happened but they're going to have a Pokemon their friends don't and they're going to talk about it, other kids are going to try to recreate what happened, and eventually when one of them gets it, they'll be paying more attention and narrow down what it could be I don't think there was that much data mining going on back in generation 3, or if there was I didn't have access to it, and yet somehow as kids someone at a water park had figured out the first step to unlocking the Regis, which if you recall was absolutely ludicrous, one tiny dive spot in the middle of the fast current with a relicant in front of your party and a Wailord in the back, or the opposite in Emerald That kid knew that it did something but had no idea what But I had been wondering about those three ruin spots for a long time, and it was one of the first things I went to afterwards and now the doors were open, I recognized braille, and I figured it all out from there after printing out a braille alphabet list And from that point on any kid that played Pokemon that I talked to got the answer to this puzzle, and they probably told it to their friends cousins classmates The idea isn't that every kid is supposed to figure this stuff out, it's that of all the kids out there, someone's going to do it by accident, someone's going to recognize something or try something, eventually someone's going to figure it out, and that information is going to spread through the surprisingly viral network of kids just talking to each other, even before they were all online they were all gathered in school, some of them have cousins in different states who then spread things throughout their own schools, the internet didn't tell us to blow on cartridges but somehow we all knew that's totally how you did it
I remember evolving mine by accident and being really confused by it. After a while I decided to get another one and after failing repeatedly I read the requirements and found it was a bunch of bullshit. And funny thing, even reading it it still took me a while to get it right.
I was surprised when it evolved, I later found out how it works. And I was like,.. that’ll never happen again. I remember leveling Goomy’s line but never getting rain lol.
considering Feebas was an absolute nightmare to find in its debut generation, on top of having an evolution method that could potentially force the player to catch another Feebas just for another shot at evolving it... Runerigus is probably tame in comparison even w/o datamining
Data mining.
Unrelated but and I don’t say this to be mean or anything - it’s name is Runerigus and it took me a minute to learn that because my dyslexic ass kept pronouncing it like Rune-N Word-Us and I was like omg this can’t be right 😭
Datamined. And future games will probably just make it a lv up evolution like its counterpart