Spiritomb and Its Mini Quest

Pokemon Go this year has a pretty nice Halloween event. Two new Generation 4 Pokemon (Drifloon and Stunky, plus their evolutions) and a huge influx of Ghost type Pokemon. Giratina has replaced Mewtwo in level 5 raids and November 3rd promises nothing but Gengar in raids for 3 hours, with Gengar having a shiny form. But there’s also some special research. A quest called A Spooky Message. The reward? A Spiritomb.

As special research goes, A Spooky Message isn’t particularly difficult or anything, it’s just tedious. There are 3 parts to this special research, but stage 3 doesn’t actually do anything. Everything is tied to the number 108, which is Spiritomb’s number in the Sinnoh Pokedex. I had to look that up because I had no idea, and neither 10 nor 8 are particularly spooky numbers.

The first stage is simple enough. You need to catch 10 Ghost type Pokemon, land 8 Great Throws and use 108 berries to catch Pokemon. That last one does sound rather difficult, especially if you recently just finished the Mew quest which requires using 50 berries on Pokemon. Luckily though, all of this is completely doable. The 10 Ghost types should be very easy to do as Gastly, Shuppet, Duskull and Drifloon are literally everywhere right now. Basically tripping over the bastards. The reward for 10 Ghost Types is another Duskull. The 8 great throws can be done however you want – I did mine all on a Girantina that got away from me, meaning that you don’t need to catch the Pokemon for the great throws to count. You also don’t need to do curve throws either.

The 108 berries task seems hard, but you don’t need to catch the Pokemon. This means you can purposefully just feed a Pokemon a berry and leave the encounter, or use normal balls and bad throws to encourage Pokemon to break out so you can feed them more berries. Higher level raids are actually pretty handy since I ended up feeding about 20 berries to two Giratinas, and the raids all gave me berries anyway.

Stage 2 is… mostly the same. This time you have to catch 10 Dark type Pokemon, spin 8 Pokestops you have never spun before and catch 108 Pokemon. Dark types are, again, pretty simple, since Poochyenas are everywhere, and there’s also a nice helping of Sableyes and Houndours too. These Dark types also count towards the 108 Pokemon task, which is nice. Catching 108 Pokemon isn’t hard, just slow.

The Spin 8 New Pokestops though… that’s a bit tricky, depending on where you live. If you live in a big city, there’s almost certainly a few Pokestops to find, but the smaller the location, the fewer Pokestops around. Also, gyms don’t count. It HAS to be Pokestops. You can tell if they haven’t been spun yet because they have a little circle orbiting above them.

Weirdly though… you don’t actually NEED to spin the 8 Pokestops! Spiritomb is the reward for completing the catch 108 Pokemon challenge! Which is really strange. But really good because there are plenty of places that are really lacking in Pokestops. For me, I only just managed this challenge since I’ve done most of the stops where I live, and the few remaining ones are locked away behind museums and things like that. Should the task come back, I could feasibly find 10 more stops, but that’s not always an option for everyone.

The only downside to not completing the Spin 8 New Pokestops task is that you don’t get the 10 Pokeballs, stardust and 8 Silver Pinaps, and you can’t complete Stage 3.

Then again, Stage 3 consists of 3 automatically completed tasks that all give 1080 experience each, as well as 10 and 8 Spiritomb candies and more stardust. After that, the quest is over.

As for Spiritomb itself? It’s not the best. It has dark and ghost as its types, which would make it pretty strong if it had good stats, but Spiritomb’s mostly just there for your Pokedex. It’s not a mythical Pokemon nor a legendary, meaning it can be traded. It’s just a hard Pokemon to obtain. Still easier than catching Bagons or Dratinis though, since it has no evolution or anything. And this quest is probably easier than trying to catch Spiritomb in other Pokemon games…

Still, Spiritomb is a very nice little Halloween treat. And it looks so damn happy all the time!