I can't believe it. I really can't believe it... I was watching some AVGN videos when it appeared. Shiny Ho-Oh appeared. It finally happened! Someone please tell me I'm not dreaming, please!
As soon as it happened I told a couple of friends about it, and then proceeded to stream the battle for them, so we could all share the moment together. I calculated how many turns I had before it ran out of PP and started struggling: 20. My plan was to lower its health with Latios and mega evolve it using Thunder Wave, so it was paralyzed and I could resist a bit more, and then capture it with a Premier Ball. But I didn't realize one tiny detail: I only had 7 of those balls. Of course, with how bad the RNG had been treating me lately I guessed it wouldn't be enough, and that was right: it wasn't enough. OK, change of plans: use whatever other balls I had at hand, and save my Master Ball for turn 19. A Luxury Ball, one Ultra Ball, another Ultra Ball... All along, this monster was annihilating my team. Mega Latios, Sceptile and Castform sacrificed themselves for the cause. By this time I was entering the 13th turn with nothing but Tentacruel at the helm, so I was getting anxious. Only now it was my turn to get lucky, and after some of the longest seconds in my life, the creature finally sat comfortably inside its spherical prison, a brand new Ultra Ball.
So here it is, at last, after countless resets and many, many, many wasted hours! Now it can stay in Bank forever beside my pink Lugia.
I have no way to know the number of attempts I made, but by calculating the difference between the in-game timer and 3DS Activity Log I can see how long I dedicated to this task. Since it was the only shiny I searched for in Omega Ruby, all this time was spent in search of the elusive shiny.
104 hours... Man, if I had used that time to learn something useful I could probably be a millionaire by now. Whatever, I don't regret anything.
