Players have been knocking Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’s The Teal Mask DLC for being light on new content outside of the updated Pokédex, but they likely haven’t seen what is hidden behind the Ogre Oustin’ minigame. If you are willing to put in the time with this sometimes frustrating experience, you may just find yourself walking away with the grand prize—a free Shiny Munchlax.
That’s right, while a majority of the Pokémon you are scripted to encounter in The Teal Mask are Shiny-locked, this Munchlax is the opposite. It is the rare instance of a 100 percent guaranteed Shiny, only this time it is hidden behind the hardest part of some DLC side content.
In order to give yourself the best odds at winning this Shiny Munchlax, you will probably need to get some Ogre Oustin’ practice in and gather a few friends who are willing to suffer through the grind with you.
How to unlock Shiny Munchlax in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet The Teal Mask Ogre Oustin’
Unfortunately, this guaranteed Shiny is not as simple to get as Gold and Silver’s Red Gyarados or event Legends: Arceus’ Shiny Ponyta. Instead of progressing the story or finishing a side quest, The Teal Mask makes you beat its main minigame on the hardest difficulty.
This means you will need to clear Easy, Normal, and Hard difficulties alone or with friends in order to get the top prize from Kitakami Hill’s biggest attraction.
Once you clear Stage 10 on Hard Difficulty, you can talk to the person running the Oger Oustin’ booth again and they will reward you with a Shiny Munchlax that has a special Crafty Mark, labeling it Munchlax the Opportunist.
Easiest way to beat Ogre Oustin’ in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet The Teal Mask
The first thing you want to focus on is your strategy for collecting berries from balloons while playing solo and with friends—because they are very different approaches.
Playing solo, you can only carry 30 berries total in your inventory, but that shouldn’t matter for most of the early levels. So, while you are grinding out the easier difficulties, you can just go around the map and pop the exact number of balloons you need to fill up each color’s basket.
Playing with other players will open up your ability to spread out and collect as many berries as possible, flooding the baskets as quickly as you can.
Some players will tell you to focus on resetting until you get one of the “good maps,” since there are multiple, like the one with rocky outcrops or the apple orchard. I agree with them, because for me, the worst part of playing this otherwise fun minigame was doing it on the orchard map with all of its narrow passages.
As for what to do when Greedent, Skwovet, and Munchlax appear to go after your stored berries, there are two key strategies.
When playing alone in earlier levels or while coordinating with friends, you can simply pop balloons and hold onto the berries until you are all ready to drop them into the baskets and end the round immediately. This will keep any wild Pokémon from spawning since there are no berries to go after on the map.
Once you get to the higher difficulty stages you will need to be more active in scaring the wild Pokémon away. The best way to do this is to either time your berry dumps well and remain near the baskets to scare off all of the Pokémon, or when playing with friends, have someone make only one run out to pop balloons, and then stay next to the baskets to constantly scare the wild Pokémon away with the R Button “roar.”
That latter strategy is very important in the later stages and could end up being the only reason you win, unless you have excellent communication when collecting berries. Having one player stand in the middle of the baskets and scare Pokémon away is key.
When you reach the middle stages of Hard difficulty you will need to collect over 70 berries to complete it. By the time you reach Stage 10, if you ever make it that far, the berry total exceeds 200 and there is no feasible way you are going to complete that on your own.
Get a group of friends, or team up with some randoms from social media or Reddit and complete the Hard challenge together, or you might as well spend your time hunting for a Shiny Munchlax in the wild.
How to invite friends to play Ogre Oustin’ in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet The Teal Mask
It is very simple to create a lobby or join a team for Ogre Oustin’ in The Teal Mask.
At Kitakami Hall, after you bring up the menu by talking at the Ogre Oustin’ booth, you can select Play Alone, Create Team, or Join Team—along with connecting to the internet without needing to exit out.
Clicking Create Team will automatically generate a lobby with a unique Link Code that other players can enter from the Join Team option to hop into your instance. If you need to join someone’s team, ask them for their Link Code and join up from the Join Team menu, which will prompt you to enter the code right away.
This does limit your ability to just queue up with totally random players like in Tera Raids, but that is a good thing, since you will need more communication in this minigame compared to just bringing complimenting Pokémon to a raid.
