The “A Paldean Adventure” Research is Rather Tedious

With the start of a new season, we’ve been given a new special research, A Paldean Adventure. While it is a special research, it’s also a lot of work, with not much of interest when it comes to rewards. So far, it’s only rewarded a Paldea starter based on what path you take, and a LeChonk, which has been spawning all over the place in the two Paldean events.

As of writing, I don’t know what stage 5 is, but it’s quite possible that it might be nothing. Or it could be catch 800 Pokemon. And it might just reward us with another LeChonk. Either way, it’s not the most fun.

This special research requires you to catch a lot of Pokemon. 600 at minimum. Sure, catching Pokemon is something we do every day, but we already have the “catch 1000 Pokemon” task in the Master Ball research. It’s also annoying to finish catching 200 Pokemon on stage 3/5, only to have to catch double that on stage 4/5. But if you want to give us a long task, catching Pokemon is probably the most boring task you can give us. Heck, spread the 600 Pokemon over all five stages, rather than giving it to us in one massive chunk.

One of the tasks is also quite annoying. In stage 3/5, you need to evolve whatever starter you happened to pick after stage one. Which is a bit tricky if you deleted that starter. Luckily you can evolve any starter into its second form, it doesn’t have to be the one you got from your research. But stage 4/5 requires that you evolve a second evolution into its third evolution. Which costs 100 candy. And kinda sucks if you already evolved one before stage four. I guessed in advance that we’d have to fully evolve a Pokemon, after all, it’s always like that in the $1 research tickets you get for Community Days. But you’d better get that research task done before the Paldea events end, otherwise you’ll have to rely on eggs to get candy.

Not only that but it has two time gates. On stage 3/5, you have to earn a heart with your buddy on 7 different days, and on stage 4/5, you need to spin a pokestop on 14 different days. These tasks are set up to be roadblocks, to stop people from racing through the special research. Niantic didn’t seem to care about that with the Master Ball timed research though. On the plus side, at least these research tasks don’t ask you to do x things, y days in a row. The old “spin a pokestop 7 days in a row” task seems to have been replaced with these “7 different days”, meaning that, if you miss a day, you don’t need to start over. But still, these tasks are just more annoyance.

I wouldn’t mind if the rewards were any good. They’ve been quite basic so far. The only interesting reward is 5 Team Rocket components to build into a Rocket Radar. But that’s pretty much it. I’m really hoping that stage 5 gives us something good, because so far it’s been crap. And no, completing the research itself isn’t a reward.

Still, the reason behind these tedious tasks might be a good reward. After all, when we had similar research for Alola, we were rewarded a Cosmog, although we didn’t get the candies to evolve it. So maybe we’ll get the two legendaries from Scarlet and Violet. I doubt it, but considering how quickly you get said legendary Pokemon in the games proper, getting them early in Pokemon GO wouldn’t be that strange.