Aipom must feature heavily in the Detective Pikachu movie, because it’s the prehensile-tailed purple monkey’s turn to shine here with this most recent Pokémon GO event. In addition to detective hat Pikachu, Shiny Aipom is the big prize of this event, which will feature increased spawns from a range of Pokémon found in the movie, including possibly Mr. Mime.
In addition to the special creatures, we’re also getting double catch XP and specially-themed raid bosses. Mewtwo seems to feature heavily in the movie, but there’s no indication we’ll be seeing the superpowered Gen-1 legendary yet.
Aipom should be pretty easy to spot out in the wild: it gets an all-over pink makeover that’s fairly distinctive from its standard purple coloring: note that the image above is from the movie, and does not feature a shiny Aipom. As usual, these shiny variants have been sitting the game files forever as well as having been in the mainline games, so we know exactly what it’s going to look like:
Aipom Family VS Shiny Aipom Family #PokemonGO pic.twitter.com/HQGvZfrDKN
— PokeWreck | GO Field Guide (@PokeWreck) May 7, 2019
It’s not the most exciting shiny, but it’s definitely still recognizable. Little Aipom appears to be significantly less friendly in its realistic incarnation, raising all sorts of questions about what sort of damage a monkey with sharp teeth and a hand on its tail could do.
Here’s the issue with Aipom: Aipom has spent large swaths of this game’s lifetime as one of the most common spawns out there, and it’s sort of hard to catch. It won’t typically yield to a standard Pokéball, and even plays fast and loose with a razzberry/master ball combination. It’s sort of like Murkrow, another easy-to-find, tough-to-catch creature that’s been haunting my spawns for years. Naturally, I hate Aipom.
Luckily, shiny checking doesn’t involve going through the actual catch process, so I’ll be doing my best to grab two shinky monkeys, with one extra to evolve into an Ambiapom. Wild shiny rates are approximately 1 in 450, so you’ll need to do a lot of hunting. If Aipom returns to its regularly-elevated spawn rates, however, you might still have plenty of chances to catch after the event ends.
