Pokemon Sleep is a weird game. After such a long wait, it’s finally here and all I have to say about it is, yep, it’s definitely here. It measures your sleep and gamifies your health, but I’m not entirely sure it’s actually a game. I have a lot of questions about what the game is doing with my sleep data, why Pokemon Go needs that data if it’s connected, and what the point of it all is, but I risk getting too philosophical for this lighthearted opinion feature.
The most shocking thing about Pokemon Sleep, other than the fact I’ll be terrible at it because I have a toddler, is that it has shinies. I didn’t think this was enough of a game to be worth implementing shinies. I figured it would be more akin to Pokemon Smile than Pokemon Scarlet, just an app that made kids sleep good. But it’s got a PokeDex and Professor, why wouldn’t it have shinies?
The shinies aren’t a problem – I understand Select Button and Niantic want the game to pull you in and keep you playing (can you call it playing? Sleeping? Sleep-playing?) so they can harvest that sweet, sweet health data – the colour of the shinies is.
My colleague Meg Pelliccio encountered a shiny Snorlax in the app, excitedly sharing a screenshot in Slack to show off. As soon as I saw it, I physically recoiled. Not in disgust, but in shock. It wasn’t blue. It’s… green? A bright green, like Rayquaza or shiny Espeon. Now I’m no fan of Snorlax’s original shiny, it’s one of them that’s too similar to the original like non-Mega Gengar and Blissey, but you can’t just go around changing the colours of a shiny. Can you?
It turns out there’s a precedent for this. Check out these Ivysaur sprites from Diamond & Pearl (left) and HeartGold & SoulSilver (right). Two games, same generation, incredibly different colours for the same Pokemon. Parasect’s red mushroom shell became pink for two generations. Gengar, poor Gengar, has flitted between shades of purple for decades. Chikorita was yellow when it was introduced in Gold & Silver, before Crystal changed it to green and that stuck.
Spinarak is a special case, with a striking purple sprite in its first appearance being changed to a boring green from Crystal onwards. However, this appears to be an artistic choice in Gold & Silver, as it could only be encountered at nighttime. The purple is apparently not its actual colouration, just how it looks when emerging from the shadows of the long grass as opposed to seeing one crawl out of a tree you just headbutted at noon. Bellossom’s dress started pink, changed to red, and then evolved into the green and yellow we know today. Sneasel started out as a brown creature. Lugia used to have black markings, not blue. You get the picture.
So Pokemon can just change colour, but this is the first time a shiny has changed so dramatically, and one of the first times a colour shift has not coincided with the advent of a new technology or generation. Pokemon rarely change colour just because.
But Snorlax has. Its regular, non-shiny form looks identical to the modern colouration, but its shiny couldn’t be more different. And now I’m asking questions. Will every Pokemon in Sleep have a new shiny, or just the crap ones? Will Snorlax’s shiny be green in future main series games? Is Pokemon about to introduce more variants?
I was a little surprised that Team Rainbow Rocket didn’t debut in Ultra Sun & Ultra Moon with a new rainbow shiny variant, but Sleep’s alternative palettes could be the same, just later. I don’t think we’re going to lose the old shinies outright – though it isn’t out of the question – but Pokemon clearly wants to create a pseudo live-service with its raids in the past two Switch games, and releasing more shinies feels like an extension of that. Maybe this Snorlax colour will be exclusive to Sleep, and you have to transfer it across to get a green sleepy boi in Scarlet & Violet? It’d keep you in the ecosystem, it’d force completionists to download Pokemon Sleep, it’d be a win-win for The Pokemon Company.
I’m not sure why shiny Snorlax is green, but I don’t like it. As Pokemon moves towards a strange live-service model in the main series games and gamifies our health habits, collecting data as it does, releasing new shinies feels dodgy. Something feels off about it, something I can’t quite put my finger on. Shiny Snorlax going green feels like the start of something bigger, and bigger doesn’t always mean better.