A Season of Misunderstood Mischief

For this season of Pokemon GO, things have been a tad different. It’s been multiple months of mischief. And along side it, we actually have a quest for a new Mythical Pokemon. However, unlike normal Mythical Pokemon quests, Hoopa’s quest has a small twist on things.

A good idea in theory

Misunderstood Mischief is an attempt to do something new. Rather than just release the entire quest in one go, Misunderstood Mischief is designed to work alongside current events in Pokemon GO. Each of the research’s steps tied in with concurrent events, making it a tad easier to follow. In the mean time, the paused stages allowed people to do something else, like not catching Ghost types.

However, tying a special research to events throughout the season means you need to be actively playing while those events happen. The Misunderstood Mischief research coincided with the Pokemon GO yearly Halloween event. The special research stage during Halloween was to catch ghost types. Unfortunately though, if you didn’t finish that quest during Halloween, you’ll have to rely on random spawns.

This can set an average player back quite away, especially if they don’t play regularly. Once an event that the research ties into is over, it’s difficult to pick back up again

Long waits are tedious

I actually feel like the long weren’t that bad. At the very least, they offer a bit of time to try and catch up. However, for normal people, they aren’t fans. The long waits for the next step were somewhat annoying for more active players, mostly because no one could progress past them.

Rather than just saying “wait until we do more research”, I think there should have been something for players to do. Heck, during the downtime, put in a global challenge to catch as many ghost types you can, or something like that. Waiting is boring and no one likes waiting. But if you give people a distraction while they wait, they won’t be as annoyed as they are only waiting.

Rewards were garbage

The biggest issue by far though are the rewards. As a twist, we actually get Hoopa very early on in this special research. Not much we can do about it though, since the quest steps were locked for a while. But aside from the Hoopa, the other rewards were god awful. Many of them were just Pokemon that were already in whatever event the quest steps were tied to. Sure, Professor Willow says why these rewards have some story-based reasons to exist. But that doesn’t matter much if you get something you’ve already got a lot of, or can easily get in the past.

You know what bothers me more though? The last Pokemon you get for completing Misunderstood Mischief. You’d think that, surely, since we caught Hoopa early on, we’d get something cool on the last encounter, right? Nope, you get a fucking Dusknoir. A Dusknoir that doesn’t even have its community day move.

There were so many things you could put as a final reward for this research. But no, we just get a Dusknoir. A kinda lame Pokemon.

“But what about the second quest?”

If you complete Misunderstood Mischief before the end of the month, you will get a second quest, for free. Or, if you don’t finish the quest, you can buy it for 5 quid. That is the real reward of this months-long quest. But is another special research really a reward? I don’t think so. Especially when Misunderstoof Mischief ended with a Dusknoir.

At the end of the day, having wait periods in special research is okay, but it could all be a bit better. Especially the Pokemon encounters.

I suppose, we should be used to that by now. Oh well.