Charged Up Research Day – My Thoughts

I’ll be honest, I’ve always been a sucker for electric types. Zapdos is my favourite Legendary Bird, Raikou is my favourite Legendary Beast and, outside of Pokemon, I’ve always drifted towards those with electrical powers, like Volt in Warframe. So an event in Pokemon GO featuring a bunch of electric types was always going to draw my attention. It’s a shame that the Charged Up Research Day was shit.

The first thing I’m going to complain about is the spawns. Okay, sure, we had Shadow Raikou in raids, but I only saw one in four hours and there was no one around to do it. I also didn’t see any Tapu Koko raids. The other raids were all pretty normal seasonal ones, and mostly consisted of Shadow Pineco for some reason. But the spawns were weak to say the least. Pikachu, Pawmi, Voltorb, Emolga, Minun and Plusle, scattered among normal spawns. Out of those, Pikachu, Pawmi and Voltorb are all common seasonal spawns, with Pawmi having been a common Pokemon since the season of Paldea. Pawmi and Emolga lack shinies, and all of them except Pawmi and Voltorb are a pain in the ass to catch.

I suppose at least some of the Pokemon in the research tasks were good, because that was where all the shinies were supposed to be. Research tasks gave Blitzle, Chinchou, Electrike, Helioptile or Joltik and they all had increased shiny chances. Out of all of these though, only Helioptile is particularly rare.

The research itself was fine, and I didn’t come across any non-event research. However, some of the tasks were kinda annoying: sending gifts with stickers is fine but there’s a daily limit to how many gifts you can send, while earning 3 hearts with your buddy is also somewhat limited. At least you can somewhat easily earn 6 hearts per buddy before needing to wait or switch. At the same time, Earn A Candy With Your Buddy was annoyingly common. I did my best to stack these and walk something low-distance, but I had to carry only two of them so I could do other research in the mean time. Making Nice and Great Throws wasn’t too bad, since Voltorb existed, but I did most of mine on research Pokemon I kept uncaught in my stack. Use A Super Effective Charge Attack was bugged half the time – it only seemed to work for me when I also did a Battle in a Gym task, despite doing both a training battle against the Team Leaders AND doing a Team Rocket fight. It was nice seeing a Battle in a Gym task, but every non-yellow gym had a raid on it when I got that task, meaning I had to hold on to it for a bit too long.

Overall, I did exactly 50 research tasks, exhausting every single Pokestop in old town near where I live, aside from a handful that were just too out of the way or were otherwise inaccessible. I walked about 8km total. And out of all 50 research tasks? I got one shiny, a Joltik, on my 50th research task. Considering that the chances were supposed to be 1/10 for any of the research Pokemon, I think I got kinda unlucky. Sure, I got the one Pokemon I was looking for (although I DID want a shiny Manectric), but I could have done better. Especially since I exhausted every single fucking Pokestop near me and didn’t skip a single one.

I wouldn’t be so annoyed but I didn’t really get any keep-able Pokemon either. I only found one 96% Pokemon, no 98%ers nor hundos. Okay, sure, none of these Pokemon are that useful, outside of Chinchou’s evolution for PvP and Mega Manectric for raids, but I’m still missing a good Manectric. That being said, Lanturn kinda needs PvP IVs for GBL, which you can’t get from research. I suppose I should be thankful that my lone shiny was a 3*.

Still, for an electric-type event, I feel we could have done better. It would have been nice to see a new shiny like Emolga, or perhaps just more varied electric types in the wild. And I would have loved to see the rotating research tasks, similar to the ones we had in the Sinnoh Tour, which refreshed every hour. With this event, I was very heavily restricted to where I played, and there was a definite limit to how many research tasks I could do. Had we had the rotating and refreshing tasks similar to the Sinnoh Tour, I would have been able to do and play more.

Eh. At least I got what I wanted, but 50 research tasks for 1 shiny is pretty sad.