Pokemon Let's Go Pikachu and Let's Go Eevee have just been announced. The new Pokemon RPGs are influenced by Pokemon Yellow and take place in the Kanto region, and they're designed for newcomers just getting into the main Pokemon series. In that spirit, the games have a lot in common with Pokemon Go--and even connect to it directly.
This was a big rumor leading up to the announcement, and a lot of diehard Pokemon fans were pretty unhappy about it on Twitter. That disappointment made more sense when people thought Let's Go Pikachu and Let's Go Eevee were "Pokemon Switch," the core Pokemon game announced at E3 last year. That game is entirely separate from the Let's Go games, but it's not coming out until the latter half of 2019, and that's a long time to wait if you're not excited about Pokemon Go overlapping with your "regular" Pokemon.
I haven't played Pokemon Go in many months, and though I'm still looking forward to Let's Go Eevee--the true version, since Eevee is obviously the best Pokemon--I wasn't planning on utilizing the Pokemon Go connectivity much. The main feature is the ability to transfer Pokemon from Go into Let's Go, and I don't have any Pokemon in Go that I wouldn't be able to catch in basically any Pokemon game...because I haven't been farming shinies.
Shiny Pokemon are ultra-rare, alternately colored Pokemon--you have a one in 8192 chance of encountering one if you don't utilize any special methods, and even then it's hard to get them. I've only found one shiny Pokemon in the wild, apropos of nothing, in my thousands upon thousands of hours playing Pokemon games over my lifetime, and all the other shinies I do have I got through special events. I desperately want a shiny Umbreon. And I was very jealous when I saw people get shiny Charmanders during a recent Pokemon Go Community Day, events centered around specific Pokemon with an increased chance of finding the shiny variants.
Community Days have the best shiny rates in any Pokemon game of any type, at least for the starring Pokemon (according to data gathered by Reddit user chflorian, it's around one in every 25 spawns). But before the Let's Go games were announced, I didn't have enough of a reason to participate; I mostly want shiny Pokemon for battles, and I like to battle in the core Pokemon RPGs. Now those Pokemon aren't trapped in Go forever, and transferring a shiny Pokemon from Go to Let's Go will be the single easiest way to get shiny Pokemon in any Pokemon RPG ever.
The last piece of that puzzle is whether Let's Go will be compatible with Pokemon Bank or any other core Pokemon game, including Pokemon Switch. We haven't gotten any confirmation about that either way, but seriously: If I can transfer a shiny Pokemon from Go into Let's Go Eevee, then Bank it for my main team, I will be outside playing Pokemon Go again like it's 2016.
