Pokemon Home Update Gives Scarlet and Violet Players a Free Shiny Meloetta

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet players are no strangers to giveaways by now with Pokemon like Sprigatito, Gyarados, and many more given away over the past few years, but now, Pokemon Home is doing a different kind of giveaway. Instead of just giving out Pokemon because the Pokemon Home got updated or for no reason at all, Pokemon Home users can now claim a free Pokemon so long as they’ve completed certain Pokedexes from Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. The first of these giveaways is live now with a Shiny Meloetta up for grabs.

To be clear, Mystery Gifts were already very much a part of the Pokemon Home experience — it’s the Pokedex requirement for the Shiny Meloetta that’s new. If you want this Shiny Meloetta in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, you’ll have to have completed the Paldea Pokédex, Kitakami Pokédex, and Blueberry Pokédex which means that you’ll need to have bought and largely finished the two DLCs known as The Teal Mask and The Indigo Disk. That’s a lot of Pokemon to find, but if you’ve done so, you’ll get a Shiny Meloetta dropped into your Pokemon Home bank after confirming that all Pokedexes have been completed.

The Pokemon Company’s Shiny Meloetta announcement said that Pokemon Home users have to go to the “Games” tab of their app to confirm that they have in fact completed all three Pokemon Scarlet and Violet Pokedexes. If that’s the case, you’ll get the Mystery Gift even if you’ve already completed the Pokedexes previously and will be getting the free Pokemon retroactively.

For those more inclined to actually use this Shiny Meloetta in battle and are worried about what its stats look like, The Pokemon Company also shared a screenshot of the Shiny Meloetta in the Pokemon Home app. The image below shows the version of Meloetta which is presumably the one everyone will be getting — a Level 50 Pokemon that knows Relic Song, Echoed Voice, Psybeam, and Sing with a Modest nature and Serene Grace as its ability. Like every other Mystery Gift giveaway of this kind, the Shiny Meloetta will come in a Cherish Ball.

While this is a first for Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, it definitely won’t be the last kind of this giveaway from the Pokemon Home app. The Pokemon Company concluded its announcement by saying that there will be more Mystery Gifts given away for completing “other Pokedexes in the future” which is a pretty clear nod to Pokemon Legends: Z-A even if the game wasn’t mentioned specifically.

That new Pokemon game has been the talk of the Pokemon community over the past few days, but not for reasons The Pokemon Company would prefer. A massive leak directed at Pokemon developer Game Freak essentially blew open the doors on Pokemon plans new and old with early, scrapped versions of Pokemon made public along with previews of what’s to come in Pokemon Legends: Z-A. All of those leaks are obviously putting forward information that’s quite subject to change, however, but they still amount to an unprecedented level of access into an unreleased Pokemon game.