I am Loving these Throwback Challenges in Pokemon Go

Over the last few weeks, we’ve had a throwback event. The event has been split into parts, one for each of the current regions of Pokemon in Pokemon Go. We started with Kanto and, at the time of writing, are in the Sinnoh week. This will be followed by a Unova-based event. And, honestly, these events have been really fun!

Special Tasks for each Region.

Every region has a series of tasks that rewards a Legendary Pokemon at the end. Kanto gave us a Mewtwo with the exclusive move Psy Strike. Johto rewarded us with Ho-Oh and Earthquake. Hoenn’s task gave us Groudon with Fire Punch and Sinnoh’s quest, which I finished today

But luckily, most of these tasks are really simple. Sure, there are some slightly difficult tasks, but with enough spawns, you can reasonably get the tasks done in a single day. In fact, I managed to complete the Johto tasks in about 6 hours. But that was mostly due to some very well-timed spawns at my house. Either way, apart from one or two tasks revolving around uncommon types, the research is ALL very easy.

Apart from “hatch and egg” and “win a raid”. For obvious reasons.

Each event has its own little boosts too.

All the events had other boosts as well. While the boost from Kanto was probably the best (who doesn’t like double stardust?), all the boosts have been… unique at least. Hoenn had halved candy distances when walking with your buddy, which is great for pretty much everyone. But it’s even better when walking a Legendary, like one of the rewards from the previous events. Sinnoh’s boost is double Lucky Egg and Star Piece duration, which is great if you are playing a lot, but isn’t really as fun as other region boosts.

You get some free good Pokemon and rewards. But also some meh stuff.

With each research stage, you’d get one or two encounters. These encounters loosely match the Pokemon you’d meet if you were playing the main games, namely those belonging to gym leaders. Some of them are great, like, really great. Sinnoh by far had the best encounters, featuring Cranidos, Shinx and Gible. But a large number of encounters were of evolved Pokemon, which meant that you missed out the chance to get a shiny. For example, one of the later Sinnoh tasks rewards an Abomnasnow, but a Snover would have been better because it’d have the chance to be shiny.

And the argument that “it doesn’t match the story of the main games” doesn’t hold water because other encounters give us base evolutions. Like the aforementioned Gible and Cranidos.

At least everyone got a chance to get Shedinja. This strange semi-evolution of Nincanda has been unobtainable for a very long time, outside of a month where it was a research breakthrough reward.

Item-wise, the Kanto research started off very strong, giving some good Pokemon but also giving things like golden razberries and rare candies. This was very quickly replaced with far less ‘expensive’ stuff. Namely normal razberries and pinaps. Which sucks. Still, at least there are rare candies to be had elsewhere.

The spawns are weirdly the worst part of the event.

That sounds strange, but it’s true. Aside from starter Pokemon and the new shinies, most of the spawns are actually kinda mediocre. Quite often, most of the spawns are starter Pokemon, which require a lot of Pokeballs to catch, and are common during events anyway. Oh and they’ve all had community days, but if you missed those, you can’t get their special moves.

The new shinies – Dunsparce, Skitty and Glameow in particular, are all alright but are kinda useless. Worse, they’re often not even that common, despite formerly being literally everywhere. They end up being misplaced by the swarms of starter Pokemon and whatever Pokemon from the region are common but don’t have shinies yet.

But then you’re left with a billion Pikachus with hats. That, yet again, can’t be evolved into Raichus with hats. Very annoying.

It actually got so bad that some of the spawns had to be changed.

For example, during the Johto event, one of the most common Pokemon around was Machop. Why? Because the only Fighting types in Johto are Hitmontop, a very rare evolved Pokemon; and Tyrogue, who only hatches from eggs. And guess what? The Hoenn special tasks included a task to catch a Fighting type.

But normal spawns had to be altered as well. During the Hoenn event, Cacnea DOMINATED in sunny weather. Like, 75% of all spawns were Cacnea. Their spawn rate was swiftly changed, but for me, Cacnea disappeared completely. The same also happened briefly with Cherrim, which yet again flooded areas in sunny weather. These had to be reduced as well.

The more surprising thing is that Sinnoh spawns were changed the most. Mainly because of the tasks “catch a ground type” and “catch a ghost type”. Sinnoh only has two ground types and one ghost type that can spawn in the wild and all of them were very rare. Luckily these were made more common. Well, Hippopotas and Drifloon were. Gible is still rare as fuck.

Overall though, these events are great.

It’s always nice to have a bunch of easy tasks and get some nice rewards for them. I’d quite happily have more of these events more often.