Summary
Pokemongames are pretty notorious titles for completionists,and that’s without the whole “two versions” thingthat forces you to buy both of them or trade with friends to get every Pokemon for your Pokedex. Completing a living Pokedex is considered the end goal in every game, and then there’s the shiny hunting community that spends even more time making sure each one has a place in their PCs.
However, if you have grand ambitions of truly completingPokemon Emerald, you may want to reconsider, as a Pokemon YouTuber (thanks GamesRadar) recently crunched the numbers and created an estimate of how much time you’d need to waste away to accomplish that task. Unless you’re immortal and can also survive the explosion of the sun, then you’re out of luck.
In their most recent video titled “How to 100% Pokemon,” Astroid Videos estimates that it will take you roughly 81 sextillion years to truly complete Pokemon Emerald, or 81,461,313,208,320,429,708,284 years to be precise. That’s down to a series of factors that they go into in their video (which I highly recommend watching in its entirety), but the main issues come down to shiny hunting, contests, and a pesky little red panda called Spinda.
It Takes 81 Sextillion Years To Truly Complete Pokemon Emerald
Shiny hunting is a beast in itself, but it’s especially brutal in Pokemon Emerald, as the game includes no ways to improve the 1/8192 chance of encountering one. To get a living shiny Pokedex, you’d need to spend a distressing 20 years of non-stop shiny hunting. On top of that, if you want to truly 100 percent the game, you’ll also have to verify each of your Pokemon has all 26 possible Ribbons you can get, 21 of which are tied to Contests.
That means you’ll need to get each Pokemon’s contest stats to their max too, and the only way to do that is to make PokeBlocks with berries. To get the perfect stat spread, you need to use recipes that contain the Nutpea Berry and Liechi Berry, the former of which you can only get via a physical e-reader card that sells for $5,000 online, and the latter of which only appears on an island that has a 1/65,000 chance of showing up every day. Then you’ve got to make the PokeBlocks and do the contests, and all of that combined puts you at 1 year and 3 days of solid play time.
We then goes intothe cursed Pokemon knowledge that is IV stats, and if you thought catching a shiny was bad, catching just 50 shiny Pokemon with perfect IVs would take you over 400 million years. Then you throw in Spinda,which has billions of different spot patterns you may find, that will take you 12 trillion years to get all of those, and catching the shiny version of each one will take you even longer. Throw in the time it takes to get all of them to level 100 and get all Ribbons with them, and you can begin to see how Astroid Videos gets a number in the sextillions.
