Pokemon GO’s Useful Tag System That I Don’t Use

The ability to better organize Pokemon has been a much-requested feature in Pokemon GO. With no such thing as boxes or PCs, your Pokemon are displayed in one big list. While this works fine with small groups of Pokemon, when you have over 1000 Pokemon available, things get iffy. A top-range phone can deal with this fine, but older phones can experience slowdown. Just scrolling through your Pokemon can be a little too tedious.

Luckily, last year, we got some QOL features to help with organization.

Some of these are more useful than others.

There’s two features I want to talk about. The first is the genuinely useful one. When doing raids, gym battles or PvP, you can now easily see what moves a selected Pokemon has. All you have to do is hold down on a Pokemon while selecting them for your team. When you do this, a pop-up window appears, displaying your Pokemon’s moves and any side effects they may have.

This genuinely makes picking teams for battling so much easier. After all, (as an example) I have multiple Rhyperiors, but not all of them have Rock Wrecker. Although I can easily distinguish between my 6 Bite/Crunch Tyranitars and my singular Smack Down Tyranitar, now everyone else can easily do the same. Without having to resort to weird naming traditions. It’s even more useful for Pokemon used in multiple ways, like Reshiram, who is used both as a dragon-type and a fire-type attacker.

Don’t judge my Rhyperior. He got me an easy ride into rank 7, last time I used him in PvP, despite most people using Mud Slap instead.

The other feature is tagging, something I thought would be just as useful.

Tagging is, as the name suggests, a way to apply tags to Pokemon, and store them in groups. You can create a tag and then select Pokemon to give the tag to. After that, you can search for Pokemon via that tag. There is one tag created by default, the Favourites tag, which, as the name suggests, contains all your favourites.

As for your own tags, you can name them whatever you want and even select a colour for them. Well, you can pick one of 8 colours. But at least black and yellow are options. There’s loads of things you can do for tags, like making ready-made teams for PvP, grouping up Pokemon for mass-transferring or evolving, or selecting Pokemon you want to send to Pokemon Home.

Personally, I have two groups, one for Pokemon used for current raid bosses (if the raid boss has multiple weaknesses), and a group called Rocketeers. My Current Raids tag changes regularly. For Kyurem, it was filled with rock and fighting types, but when Heatran arrived, I filed it with Groudons. The Rocketeers tag groups up all my Pokemon that I use in Team Rocket fights, so I don’t need to scroll past tons of Rhyperiors trying to find my Roserade.

The problem is, these tags aren’t really accessible.

Okay, sure, you get the whole “Tags” tab on your main Pokemon page. But those tags are only really accessible there. You can’t go into your Tags tab when searching for Pokemon in any battling screen. The lack of access to this page is most notable in PvP, where you often won’t be searching for similar Pokemon. In raids, you can generally just search for a specific type, but in PvP/1v1 battles, this awkward. After all, unless you’re fighting the male grunt with 3 Magikarps, you want to vary your Pokemon in case the enemy/grunt has a wildcard up their sleeve. Which is… kinda strange.

This led me to… well, not use tags at all. The only three tags I have are the ones shown above, and one of those is literally just for fun. The “The Team” tag is a group of 6 Pokemon that I’d have in my party if I was playing a normal Pokemon game. And Groudon will most likely be replaced by a Noivern once I get one.

To be fair though, you can already make custom parties, for both Raids/Gyms and PvP. But this is all the way in the Battle Tab, on a completely different menu. And switching between parties in Raids and Gyms has ALWAYS been problematic.

The problem however will be fixed when you’ll be able to search for tags, via Pokemon GO’s main search feature. But, if I’m honest, this kinda should have been added from the start. Still, once you can search for tags, I assume the tag feature will be a lot more useful.