Despite beating the Elite Four and effectively finishing the game, I have been playing Pokemon Shining Pearl an awful lot recently. I have almost doubled my play time since I accomplished this, in fact. I’m not into the competitive side of Pokemon, but one thing I do tend to do is get a living dex in each game. So I’ve been spending a lot of time in the Grand Underground, running from place to place, and it’s been pretty enjoyable for the most part. I liked the overworld spawns in Sword and Shield – one of the few things I did like about the games – and I love them here, they’re adorable. The music is great, too. It’s a very relaxing and satisfying experience slowly filling out my dex this way!

But in searching for some Pokemon I’ve hit a few…snags. Kangaskhan and Shroomish, for example, are only available in the Great Marsh, which is an extremely annoying place. It took me over an hour to find and catch a Yanma there, as the first one I encountered ran away. I hated every second of it. Several Pokemon only appear in the Trophy Garden, which changes Pokemon on a daily basis. Some are only available via swarms, another daily thing. Heracross has a 5% chance of appearing on Honey trees, which only spawn Pokemon every six hours after slathering honey on them. The Legendaries at Ramanas Park each require three Mysterious Shards to unlock, and those can only be found mining…if you’re lucky. You need around 39 to get all of them I believe, and I’ve found about a third of that in 20 hours or so of mining. I haven’t found an Old Amber for Aerodactyl yet either.

There are also version exclusives – which means more Mysterious Shard mining – and trade evolutions, and…suddenly, it’s not really all that fun. It’s a chore. A tiresome, annoying, infuriating chore. It’s not as simple as running around in the open zones in the Underground and seeing what spawns. It’s become a time management task that I need to monitor on a daily basis, because of course there is a 24 hour lock if you change the time on your system in an attempt to accelerate the process.

Suddenly I don’t want to do this any more. But I have to, because…wait. Why, exactly?

It’s because I can’t really find a satisfying answer to this that I’m writing this little essay. Maybe I need to learn how to stop.