Pokemon GO
The Unova Celebration event goes live in Pokemon GO today, giving you a chance to stock up Snivy, Drilbur, and whatever other Gen 5 Pokemon you’re still missing: I was hoping for a shot at the still ultra-rare Axew, but it doesn’t seem like that’s in the cards this time around. And with the Unova Celebration comes a new gameplay mechanic for your completionist needs: the collection challenge. Here’s what’s up with that.
You can see the collection challenge by heading over to the “today” section of the research tab, where you’ll be greeted by a series of icons. Those are the Pokemon you’ll need to catch in order to complete the challenge, and you’ll get the rewards at the bottom for doing so. And as I just found out by evolving a Lillipup into a Herdier, this is a “catching” challenge, specifically. It does not appear that getting a Pokemon through evolution counts. This time around, that’s only relevant for Herdier.
So far it doesn’t seem like any of these are locked behind eggs, which is good news for free-to-play players. We’ll still need a few days to evaluate how manageable this challenge is, however. Ferroseed seems like the rare one, but it will be available through field research.
Collection challenges seem to be a sort of replacement for the timed research we’ve been getting alongside events for a little while now: a little more freeform and not tiered into steps like research is. It’s just a little closer to the core Pokemon “gotta catch ‘em all” fantasy, just on a much smaller scale than that yawning Pokedex.
It seems like a good idea, overall. I liked the timed research when it started, because it gave some structure to an event: in the past I’d just sort of try to catch any increased-spawning Pokemon that I didn’t have, take advantage of the bonuses a little bit, and otherwise just play normally. Timed Research gave us a a way to “finish” an event that collection challenges builds on. It’s a checklist in a much more traditional way, and we wouldn’t play this game if we didn’t like checklists.
Also, there’s a new medal, another checklist: beautiful.
So we’ll see how this pans out, but I like it so far. There’s nothing like a checkmark.
