Seven Hours for a Zarude

All of a sudden, we are swimming in special research. Pokemon GO does tend to have a lot of research tasks. But many of them are based on an event and just give a handful of extra rewards. On the flip side, we’ve also had a lot of special research, which can be done at our leisure. Currently, we have Hoopa research and Meloetta research. But on October 1st, we got something that’s genuinely really new.

Zarude Special Research

Yep, before the many Mythical Pokemon we don’t have, we had a Zarude research task thrown at us. The only real reason why we got Zarude was because of a Pokemon movie tie-in. The Secrets of the Jungle was now available to a wider audience, and to celebrate, we got special research for the dark grass monkey Pokemon.

However, this special research was surprisingly easy and short. It was a bit like the shiny Celebi event, but somehow even easier.

A very, short special research.

I picked up the new special research at 10am. That’s when most new special research comes out, and also when events generally start. No real surprises there. But what was surprising was just how quick and easy the research was. To explain how easy this research is, I managed to complete it in about 7 hours. And most of that time was just having my game open next to me while I played other games. Even the 6 grunts weren’t hard. We do have event spawns currently, but you could easily finish the entire research on normal spawns

Seriously, the only hard parts of this special research were two parts. Making 5 great throws in a row, and defeating 6 Team Rocket grunts. But even the latter was made easier by the fact that you can just leave and rejoin the same grunt match over and over. Every other task involved catching grass and bug types and taking the odd snapshot.

I assume that this special research is meant to be easy though. The shiny Celebi research was very similar in difficulty. However there is almost certainly a reason why this research was so simple. Zarude’s research is a tie-in to a Pokemon movie, but it’s also stupidly hard to obtain in the main games. Adding Zarude to Pokemon GO means that people can simply transfer it to both Pokemon Home and Pokemon Sword and Shield. Just like shiny Celebi, this is a great way to get less experienced players into both Pokemon GO and the main games and get a free legendary along the way.

Doesn’t matter that it’s stats are bad, you can send Zarude to the Pokemon game of your choice and power it up there.

Turns out we got a brand new best grass type.

There’s one small problem. Zarude easily beats most grass types in Pokemon GO. It has genuinely good stats and can be used in both PvE and PvP, a rare sight these days. So ideally, you want a good one, right?

Nope, my Zarude is only just a 3-star Pokemon, and my brother’s Zarude was a 2 star, despite only 4cp difference between the two. While getting Zarude early is nice, it also majorly sucks. You can only ever get one Zarude (at least, currently). Zarude is the best grass type right now, only being beaten by Mega and Shadow Pokemon. I suppose at least grass types aren’t that common now, but Zarude has already made a place for itself in Ultra and Master League. Places where grass types are normally quite rare.

So yeah, yet again, we got mediocre Mythical Pokemon. Normally I wouldn’t mind, but Zarude is a Pokemon I’d like to use, and we’re only ever going to get one of them.

Oh well.