The Dark Flames Event Sucked

At the end of June, there was a small event called the Dark Flames event. It featured Pokemon that were fire type or dark type (or both) and introduced a new Pokemon, Turtonator. But this event also had a timed research task, and it was genuinely pretty crappy. But why was this event so bad?

Let’s start with the spawns. Of course, we had dark types and fire types. But not that many. Houndour, Vulpix and Poochyena were among the most common, and we also saw Numel and Stunky. Stunky had been around in the previous Team Rocket takeover event, and this would have been yet another good chance to unveil its shiny, but Stunky was denied yet again. Other spawns included Litwick, and we had Mega Sableye as a new Mega. Honestly the spawns weren’t that bad, but there were plenty of normal, seasonal Pokemon spawning as well. I caught a bunch of Houndour, my favourite Pokemon, but I also caught an oddly high amount of Rhyhorn as well. Which is fine, because Rhyhorn is one of my other favourites, but it’s still a bit weird.

On the surface, the raids for Dark Flames weren’t that bad, with Deino in 1-star raids, but the new Pokemon, Turtonator, was pretty rare, and often spawn-blocked by Flareon of all things.

But while the spawns were okay, the timed research wasn’t. Whether you took the Dark path or the Fire path, you had to catch a good 50 or so Pokemon, over the space of four days. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but as I mentioned before, there were plenty of unrelated spawns getting in the way. What was more troublesome though was the Purify A Pokemon task. Apparently both fire and dark type Team Rocket fights were boosted, but I didn’t see either. And that was with me checking Pokestops. I only managed to pass this step because I had a Torchic, a fire-type that I was looking to purify into a Hundo. If I had picked the dark path, I would have been out of luck.

The timed research also came with a collection challenge, based on the path you took. I went down the fire path, but both paths required you to evolve a Litten. This was simply a waste of candy, because Litten is a starter Pokemon and is due a Community Day some time in the future. For some reason, I also had to catch a Galarian Zigzagoon, which is a dark type, not a fire type. For the event, incense would spawn Pokemon based on what path you took, but it was unclear whether Zigzagoon would have spawned in my incense or not. The same applied to Litwick on the dark path.

On top of this though, the final stage required battling in three raids! That’s quite a lot of raids for a 4-day event, and with it being on the final stage, you’d have to speedrun through the previous stages if you wanted to get raids done using only free raid passes.

Unfortunately, this meant I didn’t finish the research. But not that it really mattered. The research had shit rewards, aside from a single premium raid pass. As much as I like Houndoom, the final reward from the research just doesn’t interest anyone else. And I could just evolve my own Houndours that I’d collected from the event.

So yeah, the event was overall pretty mediocre, and the research was badly thought out. There should have been more fire and dark spawns, and the 3 raids task was a large ask for the common player, this should have been reduced to one raid, or omitted entirely. And there still weren’t enough Houndours, despite fitting perfectly into this event’s theme.

Oh well.