Pokemon Sword And Shield have been in the hands of fans for almost a week now, and new secrets are being discovered and analyzed. Shiny Pokemon, one of the staples of the series, are also involved in this secrets hunting, as it has been found out that there are two different animations in the new game.

The new Shiny Pokemon animation, as reported by Serebii, doesn’t alter the Pokemon color scheme nor its stats: it is just a cosmetic change. Unfortunately, there’s very little players can do to make a Shiny Pokemon with the new animation appear, as it happens randomly.

With breeding Pokémon, static encounters and Max Raid Battles, when you encounter a Shiny Pokémon it will have a 15/16 chance of being a Pokémon with the Stars sparkle and a 1/16 chance of having the Squares sparkle. However, due to a programming quirk, at time of writing when you encounter a shiny Pokémon as a standard wild encounter, this is essentially inverted with a 4095/4096 chance of the Pokémon having the Squares sparkle and a 0.9375/4096 chance of it having the stars one when encountering a Shiny Pokémon.

Despite this being random, it is definitely a nice touch, and it could be hinting at future developments of the Shiny Pokemon mechanics in future games.

Pokemon Sword and Shield are now available worldwide on Nintendo Switch.