Suppose you play Pokémon with the sound off, and without paying much attention to the screen. Suddenly you notice a wild Pokémon battle has started. You think it might be a shiny, but you didn't see or hear the sparkle at the start because you weren't paying attention.
Worse, you don't have Bulbapedia to hand, so you can't look up the sprite for comparison. You don't have any cheating devices either.
Is there another way of determining if that Pokémon is shiny?
Pre-battle you can see the grass sparkle when you use the Poke-radar. For example
This doesn't actually help if you aren't paying attention though, but it's the only other way I know of to determine if a pokemon is shiny or not.
What I do is look at the pokemon very carefully, and since, I've been playing pokemon for a very long time I can sorta tell if it's shiny or not. If you are a first timer at pokemon, then... play with the volume!
In that case you just catch it. After that you can see a tiny star in its personal description. If it is shiny, keep it. If not, just release it or store it away. You can't have too many pokémon, unless your boxes are full, which won't happen during a normal playthrough.
