pokemon that gamefreak didn’t want you to catch.
back in 2010, pokemon black and white made catching lapras one of the most difficult tasks. in red and blue, lapras was just handed and it appeared every friday in union cave in gold and silver.
in unova, there was only one single location in the entire region where lapras could appear: village bridge. accessible only post game. players had to wait for rare rippling water spots to randomly appear while surfing. these dark rippling pools spawn quite infrequently (usually taking 30 seconds to several minutes of constant surfing to appear) and disappear quickly if they don’t reach them in time.
even if someone made it, lapras only had a 5% encounter rate in those rippling spots. the other 95% of the time they would just get a basculin instead. if someone wanted a shiny lapras, the challenge became even more difficult . the base shiny odds were 1 in 8,192. even with the shiny charm, effective odds dropped to roughly 1 in 2,730, and that’s before factoring in the rare rippling water spawns and the 5% encounter rate.
when lapras shows up, it immediately uses perish song, a move that starts a three turn countdown. when it hits zero, every pokemon on the field faints, including the lapras.
many dedicated players spent dozens of hours just trying to see a single shiny lapras, making it one of the hardest shinies to obtain in the entire generation.