Tori's Pokemon X Badge Quest

[MochiHoshi]

Shiny Pokemon are one of my favorite things about Pokemon, and over the years I've been gradually getting more and more into shiny hunting as I understand methods better. Also watching videos from people like CandyEvie, Johnstone, AbsolBlogsPokemon and Shiny Catherine had really been making me want to engage with it more. After a pretty successful (though pretty lucky and quite under odds) shiny Poipole soft reset hunt in Ultra Sun, I decided I wanted to really engage more with shiny hunting and thought I'd engage with a shiny badge quest in Pokémon X.

If you've never heard of it, a Badge Quest is a challenge where before every gym badge in whichever game you choose (with the typical number of 8, but it can go up to 18 with ScVi and how folks decide to approach the Alola games with the Crystals), you hunt for a shiny Pokemon! How someone decides to approach a Badge Quest can differ (I've seen people have a target, but if they phase, unless it's a duplicate, they still add the Pokemon they phased on as the Badge Quest member - or keep going until they get that target Pokemon), but what matters is by the end, you'll have gone on a journey to have a team of shinies. And when I decided to do another challenge and had a used copy of X with a file I could use for shiny hunting and a used 2DS, both from a retro game store, so I could also dual hunt the same or different targets, it was perfect. And also - we knew Legends Z-A was coming out so why not revisit Kalos. ... And practice my French more if I'm going to keep getting bothered about needing to practice my French. This is Kalos after all.

Now, I already stated this back on November 16th 2024 - and at this point, I already have two members for the quest already! But I like writing things down and document things more, and I realized this was a great place to do that! So there's going to be some posts talking about the hunts themselves and showing off the respective Pokemon - so posts might get long. But I hope you enjoy this journey! I'm excited to write it down and share this, maybe even talk about if anyone wants to haha. You're free to respond with anything - I think the fun thing about shiny hunting is sharing the experience somehow

(Also here's the trainer card if you're curious about this in French)

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[MochiHoshi]

The Bug Badge - Starting Shining

Started: November 16th 2024
Method: Soft-resetting
Odds: 1/4096

I thought it was kind of a no-brainer to do some soft resets for the first hunt. Being able to go through the game with one of the starters as my shiny is fun. When it comes to the Kalos starters though... I honestly think all of the final stage has some great shinies - and depending on the stage, I think each of them gets the title of "best shiny color" for them. Chespin's is my favorite from the first stages, Braixen's from the second stages, and Greninja's from the final stages but even with the final stages, I think they all end strong. So the question is - how do I decide which of the Kalos guys to choose?

Ask some of my friends. I polled them and asked them which starter they thought I should shiny hunt - making it clear I was doing a Badge Quest so they would likely evolve. And to my surprise, Chespin was the one who got the most votes! That does make me happy - like I said Chespin is my favorite of the first stage starter shiny, and the last file I had on this file of X in particular where me and some friends were trying to do a shared dex, I decided to be the Chespin Guy and evolve him all the way to Chesnaught but we stopped at the third gym so he never got to be a Chesnaught. So I was ready to go for Chespin.

... Here's the thing about doing soft resets for the starter in Kalos that I would like to relay to all of you. Each soft reset can take roughly a minute. This is NOT a quick soft reset hunt. I did remember that the segment with Shauna, Tierno, Trevor and Serena (in my character's case) involved the nicknamin and all of that. What I couldn't remember is when you saved. I DID manage to save my game before they brought you over to the table, and I was right to because you have to go through the following sequence

• Quick introduction

• The nickname where you either choose between one of the three Shauna, Tierno and Trevor give you or make your own

• Starter choice

• Prompt to nickname (though this is optional)

• Getting the Pokedex and letter to your mom from Trevor and Tierno respectively

• Calem or Serena telling you the importance of getting the letter to your mom

And if you decide to be stubborn in not wanting to wait until Camphrier Town like me, then nicknaming your Pokemon is necessary. And for a while, I was calling him Pondzi but the placement of the letters made it not go fast enough even with the touch screen and so - it was going to be called 'Skip' because it's what I wish I could do faster with the segment. And it's kind of a cute name for Chespin anyways. Oh - and if you're curious, yes, I was using the touch screen because of how quickly it made it to immediately tap Chespin's Pokeball and the nickname screen. That said, it's probably why it took me a while.

See, this hunt didn't take long because I was doing so many soft resets. As you'll see at the end, this was actually a pretty under odds hunt. No, it's because the way I specifically was doing it was NOT making it easy to let me multitask. I could listen to things, but using the touch screen made it that I had to be sure I was focusing. And while I did shorten it somewhat by deciding to give up on the idea of writing the nickname your friends give you myself and just spam A, I need to emphasize - I was NOT waiting for Camphrier Town to nickname my starter. I love giving them names. And also... I was just afraid that I would soft reset over the Chespin even though I'm kind of bad at it (I'm not good at being fast with this anyways). It has a very distinct shiny but I can't get past that fear I'll do that by accident lol. Before I picked up the soft reset hunt in September of this year, the last time I did something was in January of this year and then... my 3DS sat on my desk collecting dust. It wasn't even from not wanting to do the hunt because it was in the back of my mind, it was more from getting distracted. I wanted to try other games I had on Steam, I had to focus on my job, I like to improve my art, and sometimes I'm just way too tired for any of that and after work, I just sit back and sleep. That or I'm mentally tired to the point I can't even get myself to do something as simple as soft resets or shiny hunt for various reasons.

But remembering the Legends Z-A was coming up, as well as how I made literally no progress in the year on my 2025 Shiny Bingo where Chespin is on there, I wanted to lock in more and on September 2nd 2025 I finally dusted off my 3DS and turned the game back on to keep going for the soft resets. I couldn't confirm to myself whether or not I'd get it before Legends Z-A came out, but it didn't matter. I had to just keep going and see how many soft reset tallies I'd accumulate (because I manually use a notebook to draw out the lines - I like doing it to keep me engaged). On that day, and in the next coming days, whenever I had time (like when I was off work or home from work and didn't have the brain power for anything else), I was focusing on the Chespin hunt and doing soft resets again - tallying up every time I managed to finally hit the soft reset command and going through the process yet again. Initially, for the nickname, I would just go with "P'tit T" but I decided to switch it up between "Monsieur T" and "Sieur T" just to spice things up for myself. Also I was accounting for how many female Chespins I saw considering the gender ratio, and she'd be called Skip too no matter what. I was also messaging a friend - and at one point, when I had 180 soft resets, I accidentally said it was 280 because I didn't check which number I pressed when telling her. ... Soft reset hunts tend to not go faster when you're distracted but hey - doing things off to the side is what I like.

On September 7th 2025, while finally deciding to watch shiny hunters stream on Twitch again, I went to AbsolBlogsPokemon's stream and watched as he hunted shiny Klang in B2W2 and also looked for a curry shiny in Sword and Shield. And on that very same night, as it approached midnight and I went to charge my phone, I had my 3DS in hand in the process of another reset and after plugging in my phone to also check if Chespin was shiny, LO AND BEHOLD.

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HE'S REAL. I genuinely didn't expect for this hunt to be so under odds - and for me to only take about five more days?? I was ecstatic to see it - that's amazing. I got the count wrong initially when I tried to remember, but I'm still surprised it didn't take that long. But also really excited about how it means I could move on with some of the planned hunt ideas I had with the Badge Quest! And so the journey started for real...

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End Stats
Hunt Ended: September 7th 2025
Total soft resets: 284
Number of female Chespins: 30
Skip the Chespin - Bashful nature (I had to check Bulbapedia for the translation), Somewhat vain, found on the Badge Quest file

[MochiHoshi]

The Cliff Badge - "Method" Racing

So it took me a while to think about how I was going to talk about the milestones that would occur in this Badge Quest and by that - I'm mainly talking about the badges. I don't have all THAT much to say about in-between parts... well, other than the fact I'm having a LOT of fun discovering how the Pokemon are named in French. I caught a few just normal Pokemon because I liked the name (and also have some helpers - for example, I have a Pickup Bunnelby). And that even goes down to the gym leaders! Apparently in French, Viola's name is Violette.

And if you're curious about how the gym battle against Viola went, well - it was pretty simple fortunately with just Chespin. I used Rollout and managed to set that up against her Surskit. Turns out it doesn't even have any bug type moves, but I definitely didn't expect it to just use Water Sport of all things when all I had was a little chestnut guy. And then when Vivillon came out, I thought for SURE it would use Infestation because it was super-effective. And so, you might be wondering, what did it use instead?

Harden.
Rollout, building up its power, still OHKO'd Vivillon so.

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The next update that isn't shiny related, but still related to the team is - unsurprisingly - before getting into Lumiose City, Skip's evolved into Quilladin! This was extremely necessary for this guy to be able to fight Professor Sycamore on his own, trust.

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Well! Time to talk about the hunt itself.

Started: September 8th 2025
Method: Soft-resetting (Squirtle), Random encounters (Espurr, Honedge, Sentret or Kecleon)
Odds: 1/4096 (both games)

I wanted to think about some of these hunt targets ahead of time so I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do. But the problem I had with the upcoming area towards the Cliff Badge is how much stuff you have to do BEFORE you get to Cyllage City meaning there were a LOT of areas where you could potentially hunt. While I decided I could live without trying to get a Ralts or Flabebe from Route 4, there was one thing I definitely wanted to consider that was the Kanto starter that you can get from Professor Sycamore. After all, this is the generation where Mega Evolutions were introduced - it would be fitting to have at least one shiny Mega Evolution team member from the possible choices of Mega Stones you can get before the post-game. Squirtle was the one I was thinking of trying because I hadn't tried using Mega Blastoise before, and it seemed pretty cool to because of its ability Mega Launcher. Not to mention, Blastoise is my favorite of the Kanto starters, shiny hunting one would be a dream. So that should be cut and dry right?

And it would be if... you know, I hadn't JUST already done a soft-reset hunt for the first starter I had. I want to have at least some variety with the Pokemon that I have on my X Badge Quest, and simply going for two soft reset hunts in a row on the main file didn't seem the most appealing. But that said, I also didn't want to go THAT far into the story or the game before having another shiny team member. And again - there are SO many areas and in particular, one that I would like to shiny hunt as well which is Route 6, the place you can go to from the Parfum Palace. I love the encounter table there, and as you can tell from the random encounter targets I had, I would really like to have an Espurr, Honedge, Sentret or Kecleon. Espurr and Honedge are absolutely up there for two of my favorite Kalos Pokemon. While they aren't my absolute favorite (I'll talk about who that is whenever I make the post for the third Badge Quest member...), they're both in my Top 5 of Kalos and they both have great shinies. Sentret is a similar reason, especially with Furret and it's why I was more than happy about the possibility of getting a shiny Sentret because Furret on the team would rock. And Kecleon? Since I don't really care for how strong my team is in the end, I'm more interested in WHAT I get, Kecleon would be cool since it's the rarest possible encounter at 5%, and that's just really neat. And I don't mind trying to use Kecleon through Kalos.

So what should I do? What should my choice be? Which one will go for-- wait, that's right. I have a second game system and nothing other than my own terms will stop me from multi-hunting in different ways.

I shouldn't at all have been surprised that the soft resets was taking longer than the random encounters considering I had an Illuminate Staryu named Sirius (and by that I mean I found one of them and nicknamed them after seeing that they had Illuminate), but also my 3DS is like. An older one. I think I got it around 2013 because I remember one of those summers being a very Tomodachi LIfe and Animal Crossing New Leaf focused one. But the thing about that is that sometimes soft resets can be slow. So my prediction was that I'd be more likely to get a random encounter. I could still be wrong but you know - it'd be very neat.

So starting on September 8th, I would go almost day by day turning on both systems to both soft reset and random encounters. Whenever I was done with random encounters, I would soft reset until the amount matched the random encounters because I thought it would be interesting to see. And besides, it still didn't guarantee that it would shine before a random encounter did - and even if a random encounter DID shine, it could've been one of the Pokemon that I'd take as a phase (mainly from not feeling interested in using Nincada at the moment, and in Oddish's case, I've already used a shiny Oddish in Kalos before in my main Y file lol). I've done things like listen to streams, take the soft reset Squirtle with me while I waited for something as I cooked, or used it to spend the night after I got home from work.

And somehow. On the night of September 16th, which is almost a week after Chespin, when I was done making dinner and I finally went back to my hunts, I was still doing soft resets because of how much slower it would take to check a Squirtle than it was to do a random encounter but it seems I'll have to think about whether or not I'll go for Squirtle yet again in the future and when because that's not our new teammate!

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I'm soooo excited about having shiny Sentret AND to see that he's a boy. The reason why is because I lowkey also hoped that getting a shiny Sentret that was male would mean I could name after an OC of mine that I'm kind of obsessed with. And I did! AND he's Naughty natured? That's kind of perfect, it feels like that it's fate that this is my second team member to be honest.

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And that's the post about the second member! While I've defeated Grant, considering I'm working on some more of my bingo card hunts and October is coming up soon, the next update might take a while... I know what my possible targets are, but I haven't started the hunt yet. October is coming up, and I have a Trevenant hunt I want to finish on my main Y file and the Euphemia file before I keep doing any Kalos related hunts. But I'm excited for who could be my target for the third badge the most because one of those targets is my favorite Kalos Pokemon. But we'll all just have to see if that's the one I get.

End Stats
Hunt Ended: September 16th 2025
Total soft resets on 3DS: 415
Total random encounters on 2DS: 413
Marion the Sentret - Naughty nature, mischievous, found on the Euphemia file (which is what I call the file of Pokemon X on the used copy I bought)

[MochiHoshi]

The Rumble Badge - Fairy-ly Sweet Part 1

Hey! I'm here with an update regarding my badge quest but there's a little bit of in-between stuff that I wanted to include here while trying some new things with formatting photos with these posts! But I do have an update of another shiny that I've gotten.

First things first - back on September 21st 2025, I evolved Sentret into Furret while going through the story stuff to get to Cyllage City for the next gym badge.

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Something that I kind of dragged my feet around, because I knew there were going to be a lot of battles upcoming due to the long stretch of story between the Santalune City and Cyllage City gym badges - and I'm trying not to overlevel my team members. I have a soft level cap in the sense I don't have knowledge to hard enforce them but I'd rather hard enforce them.

I don't remember if it was the exact same day when I defeated Grant (or Lino as is his French name) or it was a bit later, but it was definitely one where I had to get a bit creative with it. It wasn't really a gym battle where I could just send Quilladin out and expect that it'd be super easy. Furret being able to learn Rock Smash was going to be good help against Amaura, as I didn't have to worry about Refrigerate, AND Rock Smash would get me defense drops and be 4x effective. I think it's funny that when Grant used a Hyper Potion to fully heal his Amaura. Quilladin managed to take on Tyrunt through a mix of Leech Seed and having the Rocky Helmet because - and I'm not kidding - I think the ONLY damage that Quilladin did directly to Tyrunt that wasn't Leech Seed and the Rocky Helmet (considering all Tyrunt has is physical moves) was a single Bite and that's ONLY because Tyrunt didn't cause Quilladin to flinch. The knockout was also a result from the Rocky Helmet. I do remember Bite doing a decent amount of damage so even if a flinch didn't happen, the gym battle was dealt with and the Cliff Badge is mine.

(Also I don't have an image of me actually GETTING the badge so enjoy reading his defeat quote in French)

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With the next badge under my belt, it's time to talk about the hunt for my next team member.

Started: October 12th 2025
Method: Random encounters with repel trick
Odds: 1/4096

If there's one reason I wanted to do the Badge Quest in Pokemon X, it's because my favorite Pokemon can only be obtained through random encounters here and that would be Swirlix or more specifically its evolved form, Slurpuff. What can I say? It grew on me the quickest with how it's a cute cake dog, and I think it's really funny that it can be as powerful as it can be and has a pretty diverse movepool! Slurpuff is a fun and silly little guy and being able to use a shiny one on this quest would be awesome.

Because I like Slurpuff so much, this hunt is going to be much more focused so even if I phased on anything else on Route 7, then that's what it's going to be. A phase. It's NOT going to let me move on to make the path to Shalour City and take on Korrina. It HAS to be Swirlix. There are a lot of phase potentials if I were to go to the flowers though, and so I moved myself to the grass near the entrance of the Connecting Cave. At this patch of grass, it's where the repel trick comes in. I suspected that I would be able to increase the amount of Swirlix that I could see because it would mean that it keeps me from seeing less Croagunks and also take out Illumise, Volbeat and Orange Flower Flabebe from being encountered if my lead Pokemo is level 14. Compared to 10% (usually) for Swirlix, as shown here I'd roughly get an increase of 7% to possibly find a Swirlix over the other Pokemon.

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Here's the thing. I'm also slightly lying. I can only think of ONE Pokemon that I could encounter that, if I manage to get it shiny, then I'll take it over Swirlix and it's White Flower Flabebe.

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I still don't see it happening, but you never know with luck! I quite like White Flower Flabebe too, especially since when I first played Pokemon Y, White Flower Flabebe was the one that I evolved into Florges and used on my team. ... Without even knowing that I had just casually caught the rarest Flabebe color. I just... saw a Flabebe, didn't think about catching it, then noticed how the flower was different and figured I should catch one and it just so happened the second one I ever encountered had the White Flower. Considering how it's the rarest encounter, yeah I think that's good enough reason to take it over my favorite Gen 6 Pokemon.

Now that I've established what those rules are, here's why this is just an update. I've already phased - and with the stuff I wanted to include, I wanted to make sure that I had the space to talk about all of that without having to bring it in with the post of... whenever I get the next member 'cause even if the next phase is my target, it has to be the next one. On October 15th actually - because I thought it would be really cool to be able to get a shiny before the actual release date of Legends Z-A (and also I was planning on going to a midnight release event - it was fun and cool).

And the first phase of this Badge Quest is this Smeargle! Who, at the time as I'm writing this update, is named Artemisia and already fully EV Trained and given the right move set in the Euphemia File and now traded over to my Badge Quest file since I'd like all the phases to be there and having a shiny Smeargle for catching Pokemon in my Badge Quest file just sounds very cool.

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Phase 1 Stats
Caught on: October 15th 2025
Encounters: 2476 (between both consoles)

Next update, I'll post her status screen - the idea I have is that, when the hunt ends, I'll include all the phases assuming that I get more. I'm aware it could be funny to see the next update, I already get Swirlix although because of the amount of images I can attach, I want to be sure I know how many I'll be stitching together first. Also I haven't continued the hunt yet, mostly because I'm seeing if I can get a bingo on my shiny bingo sheet for this year although I do want to see if I can finish it before the end of the year. So you'll know when you see the properly titled update!

[Slix]

This has been super cool to read so far! I love that you got a Shiny Sentret - one of my favorites! Good luck on your next shiny!

[MochiHoshi]

Thanks!! I'm having a lot of fun with this, especially writing it. It's fun making a forum playthrough of sorts! I'm excited to find Swirlix (or White Flower Flabebe!) to be able to write another post for this. And yeah - Sentret was such an awesome member to get

[MochiHoshi]

Very casual type of post in this thread of mine, where I want to say that since my last update, I had been playing Legends Z-A and also going through some IRL things (back in January, I actually went to Toronto Regionals fun fact - first time I've ever gone to an event like that. Also saw a live show the week after, that was fun - whoa lore about me). I've been trying to keep going at my Badge Quest hunts, and I had, but they were kind of slow on my part especially with a big one I want to do despite knowing it's a big undertaking especially for someone just documenting things for fun (maybe I'll make another forum thread based on that but who knows it will absolutely take a while). I did want to do some shiny hunting on either of those but wound up just enjoying my trips instead, like someone who was lost in the excitement of traveling for events like that after a while and was too tired to try to do shiny hunting on those trips (in all seriousness though - they were great).

With all that being said, because it's been so long, I decided that I'd make this quick update to say that another reason it took me a while is that my second phase went on for a WHILE. And at this point, it is absolutely making up for the fact that Chespin and Sentret were such short hunts in comparison. I did finally phase though - specifically on March 2nd 2026 after 6837 random encounters (and coincidentally enough, once again while I was watching AbsolBlogsPokemon stream - specifically his FireRed race of whether or not he'd find a shiny as his second badge quest member or get one of his Meowths to Level 100). So at the very least, I can finally reset the number and start a new phase since I can definitely say it wasn't my target which... I guess is obvious or else I wouldn't make it as simple as this.

And what Pokemon did I manage to encounter to end off that second phase you might be wondering?

...Smeargle again. And just because it's been a while, here he is.
I named him Guru because Pokopia was gonna come out in a few days, and now that I think about it. Artemisia was also caught literally the day before Legends Z-A released. Maybe Guru was just destined to happen. Anyways - say hi to him and hopefully I can stay consistent on hunting for Swirlix or White Flower Flabebe and move this quest along.

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Also if you got Pokopia, I hope you've been enjoying it!