Pokemon That Are a Pain to Throw Balls At

Not every Pokemon is the same. That’s pretty obvious, even if we do have Pokemon that are similar. This also means that not every Pokemon is easy to catch. In main series Pokemon games, you generally need to weaken or sedate whatever Pokemon you can try to catch. The lower health they have, the easier they are to catch, even more so if you put them to sleep. Basically you need to beat them up first. In Pokemon GO however, we don’t really have any of that. We just have berries and stronger Pokeballs, as well as more opportunity to throw balls at them.

But some of these Pokemon are not easy to catch.

A lot of the time, the reason they’re hard to catch is because these Pokemon won’t stop moving. They either jump up and down constantly or they attack a lot. Flying Pokemon tend to float up and down a lot, some just wriggle all around the catch screen. This can hamper you even further if they are a small Pokemon, but large Pokemon are hard to catch too. Luckily we have Nanab berries, which stop Pokemon from jumping or attacking, but generally your better bet is to wait until just after a Pokemon attacks, THEN throw a Pokeball at it.

Some Pokemon in particular are very small. Joltik and Boundsweet are so small that their catch ring covers includes the ground, meaning that a Great or Nice Throw can easily bounce off the ground and miss the Pokemon entirely. Other Pokemon are quite big, but are placed far away from the camera to make them easier to hit. At the same time though, some Pokemon simply have weird hitboxes, meaning that a ball can bounce on thin air and still count as a hit. Pokemon that fly up and down are also a bit dodgy, and if they break out of a Pokeball while higher, their hitbox can break and your Pokeball can fly off in an odd direction.

And then there’s Pokemon with awful catch rates. Legendary Pokemon in particular are hard to catch, and it’s made worse because of premier balls. They have the same stats as a normal Pokeball, which means those Legendaries can break out more easily. The Galarian Legendary Birds for example have a nonexistent catch rate, and your only hope on catching these Pokemon is to hope that they are under 1000CP. During the Hoenn 2023 event, we also had Latios and Latias, which were almost as impossible to catch, but didn’t instantly flee the same way the Galarian birds do. The wild shiny Latios I caught took 20 Pokeballs, and that was GOOD. Most people took 30+ Pokeballs to catch the bastards.

Thankfully, many of these Pokemon have gotten easier over the years. The hardest Pokemon, when it came out, is a bit of a tie between Kyogre and Giratina’s Altered form. They were so damn far away that it was nigh impossible to even HIT them with a Pokeball, let alone make a Great or Excellent throw. For a while, I had a 50% catch rate on Giratina, that was how hard it was to catch. On the flip side, Pokemon like Ho-Oh and Lugia are difficult to catch because they are so close to the camera.

Either way, some Pokemon are just a pain to catch. And all we can do is practice, to make hitting Pokemon a bit easier.