YMMV / Pokémon GO

A to M

• Accidental Aesop: Many of the complaints players have regarding Pokéstop placement in suburban areas end up being critiques of modern-day city planning. Pokéstops aren't placed arbitrarily; they appear at places of cultural interest and unique landmarks,^note ex. parks, playgrounds, local businesses, post offices, sculptures and murals, etc., which are typically very sparse in suburbs, but most people didn't mind, since if they're rich enough to afford a car, they can drive to bypass the sprawl of the suburbs and be where they want — and if not that, video games, television, and other common pastimes can often just be done at home. But Pokémon Go is designed so that actively playing for any sustained duration of time requires presence near a Pokéstop to get resources, and through this, Niantic unintentionally highlights the dearth of walking-distance amenities in suburbs.
• Accidental Innuendo:
  • One of Cliff's pre-battle lines is "Add my name to your list of weaknesses." In context, it's a reference to the game's Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors, but out of context, it sounds a lot like a cheesy pick-up line.
  • If you Appraise a Pokémon and it's bigger or smaller than usual, your team leader's comment on it can easily come off like they're using an Unusual Euphemism to comment on something else, especially depending on what species it is.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Why does Professor Willow need to store all the Pokémon you send permanently, rather than just studying your team when you're not using them like other Pokémon researchers? Either he's building an army or he's dissecting them.
    • He may be tagging them and observing their behavior in the wild, as he is something of an Adventure Archaeologist.
  • Despite what established canon says, some trainers still joke about how Professor Willow is processing the Pokémon you sent him into candies and sending one back to you as a gesture of thanks.
  • Team Valor, Team Mystic, and Team Instinct: innocent Dungeon Exploration Teams of Pokémon Trainers enjoying catching and battling Pokémon and encouraging healthy competition as well as various dungeon explorations, or something more nefarious, with the silhouetted "leaders" of these teams actually being shady criminals with their members being unwitting pawns? It doesn't help that in most previous Pokémon games (aside from Mystery Dungeon teams), Team ______ were almost always the bad guys (Team Rocket, Team Plasma, Team Flare, etc.)
  • While his characterization is limited, the fandom quickly adapted Spark of Team Instinct as a lovable goofball, if not simple-minded. If he's not a Cloud Cuckoolander, then he's The Stoner or a straight up Attention Whore instead. That said, he's also frequently portrayed as an All-Loving Hero, just as Team Instinct overall is portrayed.
• Americans Hate Tingle: During the game's first year, Drowzee was hated by players in parts of Canada, the northeastern US, as well as the UK and the Nordic Countries, for being even more common than the typical Com Mons.
• Animation Age Ghetto: Although a wide range of people are playing the app, there are other people who feel like anybody over the age of 12 should be banned from playing it, despite the fact that it is more directly targeted towards older fans than the main series games. Alternately, there have been those who think the game should be exclusively for older-generation Pokémon fans. There are posts on social media saying that if you've never played any of the original games on any of the Nintendo handheld systems, then you shouldn't be playing this game at all.
• Annoying Video Game Helper:
  • The pop-ups that appear every time the game is booted up, reminding players to be more wary about their surrounding and other dangers.
  • If the player is traveling over 15 mph, a warning popup appears to discourage driving while playing, which repeats every five minutes. While this is annoying enough if you're just a passenger, the message may appear indoors if the cell company just didn't care with configuring the building's microcells' A-GPS^note Assisted GPS, where the microcells are configured to broadcast a fixed GPS coordinate to aid the device due to satellite GPS signals being unable to penetrate into the building properly and thus causes the game to think that the player is somehow driving at breakneck speeds in the building.
  • If you lose to a member of Team GO Rocket, your chosen team leader will give you some words of encouragement. These simply amount to knowledge on type matchups and are otherwise useless to anyone that has memorized it. This is especially true for fighting the GO Rocket leaders and Giovanni, as there is a minor trial and error element to figuring out their current roster and bringing in the correct counters in response, compared to the mono-typed teams of the Grunts.
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • Deoxys, being a Glass Cannon outside of its Defense Forme, is anything but a Damage-Sponge Boss, and can go down in seconds to a modestly-sized raid group despite its inflated stats as a Raid boss. It's even possible to solo Attack Forme Deoxys.
  • There's also Giovanni from the Team GO Rocket quests. After finding him over lots and lots of Decoy Grunt searches, you might think that he's very hard, right? Wrong. While his Pokémon have even higher stats than the admins, his lineup is very predictable and can usually be beaten in a single fixed lineup. Basically, he always starts with Persian, follows up with a ground type and ends with the legendary Pokémon of the season, with highly predictable attacks. It wouldn't take a lot to actually get around him, and at most you might have trouble with Machamp being knocked out by Scratch, but that's about it.
• Awesome Music:
  • The Gym Battle theme is pretty damn spectacular.
  • As is their 2017 Halloween-themed remix of the infamous Lavender Town theme.
  • Many have noted that the raid battle theme sounds good enough to be part of the main series of games and even has some familiar sounding elements from other battle themes from the games. Not surprising, since Junichi Masuda, the composer for core-series Pokémon games, also composed the music for this spinoff^note And he does play this game as a Team Instinct player, too..
  • The With Lyrics version of the night theme, "We Can Go and Make a Brighter World", a duet between Haven Paschall and Ben Dixon, who have sung multiple theme songs for the English dub of the anime, is the textbook example of an Award-Bait Song... and it still sounds pretty damn good.
• Awesome Video Game Levels: Community Days and other events (such as the yearly GO Fests), especially when they shake up the spawns in a way that they feature uncommon to very rare Pokémon outside of the normal spawns covered head-to-toe in starters and a very small and static selection of Com Mons. Bonus points if the event features regional exclusives that otherwise never leave or spawn outside of their home region.
• Base-Breaking Character: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Breather Boss:
  • See a male Team GO Rocket grunt specializing in Water types? Prepare for an incredibly easy battle, as the male ones use only Shadow Magikarp. Free progress towards both your Hero and Purifier medals, AND free progress towards a Gyarados!
  • Provided you're equipped with three fire types, Bug and Grass grunts can be a breeze to go through.
  • When compared to most of the rest of their ilk, Jessie and James are somewhat of a joke. Sure, they still use Shadow Pokémon, but their stats are more akin to the final evolution of their line, not extremely bloated like most Grunts' standard-issue Shadow Pokémon. This may be due to the fact that you have to fight both of them at once. Rather fitting, considering that the duo are a pair of Ineffectual Sympathetic Villains in their home media.
• Broken Base: Too many to count, to the point it has its own page.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • Taking out enemy gyms and defending friendly ones. The actual rewards for doing this are quite modest, but it's nonetheless a powerful feeling being able to exert one's dominance in a given area.
  • Defeating Team GO Rocket grunts, leaders, or even their boss, with Purified or Shadow Pokémon.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • As of the Gen II update, Blissey is an insanely common Gym defender, for being a Badass Adorable Stone Wall that outlasts opponents with her high HP to an excessive degree. Her CP is on par with Vaporeon, making her very difficult to dislodge with brute force, and her movepool contains Fairy and Psychic attacks to counter the supereffective damage of Fighting type. Pretty much anyone who has a Blissey will use her in gyms. Thankfully, a rework to gyms made it possible to wait for her motivation to drop in order to take a gym in addition to nerfing her stats so that weaker 'Mons can deal with her, though trying to KO a Blissey that's constantly being healed is still an exercise in frustration.
    • After Blissey, the most common gym defenders are usually Snorlax and Chansey for their similar toughness, Exeggutor (especially Alolan Exeggutor) for its surprisingly high CP, wide movepool, and water resistance, and Slaking, since its over-inflated CP in exchange for lackluster moves either scares off attackers who aren't aware of its mediocre prowess when it's in a gym, or invites defenders to put it there for its high CP because they don't know it's not that good.
    • Eeveelutions are another common pick, with Vaporeon, Flareon, and Glaceon being the most used. This is due to the fact that they are much easier to get then other usable mons and have quite high CP.^note Eevee only costs 25 candies to evolve, as opposed to the standard 50, and Flareon and Vaporeon were on par with Gyarados in terms of potential CP. Jolteon is lower down the chain, being slightly better than a Pidgeot. The 0.31.0 alleviated this somewhat by Nerfing the Eeveelutions to a degree (especially the formerly dominant Vaporeon), but their power and ease of access still makes them popular choices.
    • Early in the game's lifespan, one could expect to see Lapras and Dragonite as these were the most durable powerhouses that can be obtained in the game whose CP can easily be pushed into the 2000s at levels where most others max out around 1700-1800. While Lapras would become less favorable in later years as a gym defender, Dragonite remains a top pick, alongside fellow pseudo-legendaries Tyranitar and Garchomp and the duo of bulky Ground types Rhyperior and Ursaluna.
    • Another common practice is populating a gym with low-level Com Mons — usually whatever's currently in rotation to spawn — since their motivation decays way slower than an actually powered Pokémon and players can reserve their stronger Pokémon for other purposes. Com Mons' evolutions are also fairly common sights, for being fairly easy to power up thanks to being so common.
  • When it comes to attacking Gyms, players have a habit of building up strong and bulky Fighting, Ghost, Rock, Ice, and Steel Pokémon like Machamp, Gengar, Rhyperior, Glaceion, and Aggron, all of which have utility against several of the most popular picks for gym defenders (many of whom are Normal, Rock, Dragon, and Steel-types).
  • The Go Battle League, Pokémon Go's ranked PVP service, fluctuates between three different leagues every few weeks, and this combined with the diminished amount of counterpick mind games with its 'take three in, blind open' system compared to the more fan-used 'take six in, choose three for every round' system leads most players to make a simple team of three reliable high-tier Pokémon to compete. As a result, expect to see Altaria, Galarian Stunfisk, Medicham, and Azumarill everywhere in Great League, Swampert, Talonflame, Empoleon and especially Giratina-Altered in Ultra League and Dialga, Zacian and both Giratina formes in the Masters League.
  • In theory, purified Shadow Pokémon are supposed to be stronger than Shadow Pokémon, but the data that makes this so has, for some reason, been Dummied Out since they were originally added to the game, leading to players leaving their Pokémon as Shadow Pokémon for the power boost it gives them compared to standard/purified mons (to the point that players getting distressed that they accidentally purified their Shadow Mewtwo became a minor meme on Reddit). Even Niantic seems to have abandoned plans to properly implement the original intended bonus for purified Pokémon entirely and made changes to facilitate this play-style: Later limited-time events would make Frustration (the charged move all Shadow Pokémon carry when caught) forgettable via Charged TMs, giving players even less incentive to purify their Shadow Pokémon.
• Critic-Proof: It doesn't matter how much criticism the game gets and how many controversial choices Niantic makes. The game will still retain its playerbase on brand power alone. Besides, you can't go wrong with a game that's basically the closest thing to an official Pokémon MMO that'll ever exist. Over time, the game even found its footing to become a very well-polished and extensive mobile game, possibly growing out of this trope.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Nihilego is a terrifying Puppeteer Parasite that latches onto peoples' heads, hijacks their brains, and feeds off of them as it slowly kills them off. The Go Fest 2022 Finale event adds a hat based on Nihilego, so if you ever wanted to cosplay as being parasitized by it, Niantic has you covered; you can even use it with the "Spooky" player pose to complete the look.
• Demonic Spiders: Has its own page.
• Difficult, but Awesome: The Go Battle League. The potential to obtain tons of rare Pokémon and possibly the fastest method of accumulating Stardust in the game for essentially free is there... it just requires you to win reliably, which only grows more difficult the higher your ranking gets.
• Difficulty Spike: Catch rate is based on Pokémon level, and players only encounter Pokémon up to their own level, so catches are pretty much 100% success when the player first starts. Once the player reaches higher levels, that's when Random Number God kicks in and Pokémon gain the ability to break out of the player's thrown Balls and escape.
• Discredited Meme: For the first month or so, the vast majority of PoGo-related humor revolved around Professor Willow grinding up transferred Pokémon to make candies. After every gaming webcomic in existence had its turn on the bandwagon, most players finally grew bored of this joke, and redirected their sadistic streak towards Niantic.
• Event-Obscuring Camera:
  • Poké Stops and especially gyms can obscure Pokémon that have spawned in proximity, forcing you to rotate the camera or even walk to another spot to get a proper angle.
  • The camera in gyms adjusts its zoom to fit all the defenders within its field of view. This causes problems when larger-than-average Pokémon, such as Steelix or Hariyama, are among the defenders, where the other defenders appear small and thus hard to tap. This is especially prominent with Wailord, which is about as large as all the other defenders combined (excluding aforementioned larger-than-average Pokémon) - the other defenders appear tiny and clumped together next to Wailord.
  • During gym fights, Wailord blocks most of the screen, making it near impossible to see what's going on.
  • Alolan Exeggutor causes this almost everywhere but on the world map, being taller than the screen or, more hilariously, the viewport's top edge in certain interfaces such as the Gym Badge screen, making it appear headless.
  • Catching Pokémon, especially in AR, often have smaller Pokémon seem farther away than they really are.
• Fake Longevity:
  • The Celebi questline has a slew of this. One of the early objectives has you catch at least one Pokémon 3 days in a row. This essentially consists of waiting for 3 days, opening up the game at least once each day to catch a 'mon. In another objective you have to walk 10 km with an Eevee as your buddy, in order to evolve it into an Espeon. Not too bad, but then you have to do it again but for an Umbreon. One late objective takes the cake, though: spin a Pokéstop every day for 7 days.
  • Mew, similarly, has several Luck-Based Mission objectives, like catching 10 Ghost Pokémon, battling in 10 raids (which you can do once a day unless you spend coins on Premium Raid Passes or take part in an event that gives out multiple passes each day), and landing an Excellent Curve Ball (which is far easier on some Pokémon than others).
  • Meltan is another offender. It has nine sets of tasks that all involve catching or evolving specific Pokémon, and get rarer the later into the quest you get. Catching 5 Slugma or Gulpin is hard enough in some areas, but having to catch several Fossil Pokémon including an Aerodactyl just takes the cake.
  • All-in-One #151, the special research offered as a bonus for Pokémon Go Tour: Kanto is probably the worst offender yet. Described as a longer-term research to take a while to complete, it immediately sets you off on the right foot by having one of the first objectives to be to catch all 151 original Pokémon, including all of the legendaries, Pokémon that appear rarely outside of raids such as Kangaskhan and Aerodactyl, and the aforementioned Mew. The next stage involves catching one Pokémon a day for 30 days, asking the player to play once a day for an entire month to progress. The final stage before the rewards-only stage includes the bonkers "Complete 151 Field Research tasks", which (generously assuming the player regularly spins four Pokéstops a day) could take even longer than a month to complete.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • Some Ingress fans aren't terribly fond of Go due to it having a much bigger and louder fanbase; their large numbers at Ingress hotspots (due to Go piggybacking on a lot of Ingress infrastructure) doesn't help. This has led to concerns that various properties will ban the use of all location-based games, even for the Silent Majority. The rivalry is mostly one-way, as most Go players don't even know what Ingress is.
  • There is also a large fandom rivalry with the core series Pokémon games, especially with post-Gen II/GSC fans. The fans of the core games tend to dislike the game for removing elements of the core series games, being largely limited to Gen 1-2 Pokémon (frequently seen as a Spotlight-Stealing Squad by the fanbase), and for largely gaining its success via 90's nostalgia (in fact, on debates surrounding the game, it is not uncommon to see core series fans teaming up with people who don't like Pokémon in general in criticizing the game). The Go fans tend to state that there is a bias behind these arguments, point out the exercise and massive popularity and cultural impact that the game has led to, or praise Gen 1 over the main games. This died down once Hoenn Pokémon began being added to the game as promised (which revived the "Hoenn Confirmed" meme), thus confirming that the game wouldn't just be a "Genwunner" thing.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • Given that "Pokémon in the real world" was already a common fanfic plot, it's unsurprising that the floodgates have opened in the wake of Go formally adopting the concept... albeit with its own Plot Holes, which leads to people wondering exactly how Pokémon started appearing in real life.
  • And of course, fans writing stories chronicling their real life Pokémon training.
  • Stories about the three team leaders and their connections to each other are also common.
• Fanon: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Fan Nickname:
  • All three teams refuse to acknowledge players of the game who vandalize property with game-related graffiti as being part of a team, and instead refer to them collectively as "Team Rocket". Cheaters such as spoofers (people using special apps to be somewhere they aren't physically at in Pokémon GO) or botters (people using bots that do the gaming for them) are also referred to as "Team Rocket".
  • In fan works, the male and female playable trainers are often named "Go" and "Gogo" respectively. After the protagonists from Pokémon Let's Go, Pikachu! and Let's Go, Eevee! recieved names in the E3 demo, fans took to calling them "Chase" and "Elaine" after the two.
  • Particularly when used by Snorlax, whose large HP supply means lots of energy built up from receiving damage, the move Body Slam is sometimes known as "Body Spam."
  • The mysterious grey, Ditto-like creature with a nut for a head that was leaked after the September 2018 Community Day was given a few placeholder names for it, from "Dittonut" to "Nutto" to "Missingnut", until a later update and video revealed it to be called Meltan.
    • The Spanish-speaking fandom, meanwhile, named it "Tuerkitto", coming from the spanish word for nut, "Tuerca".
• First Installment Wins: Disregarding the fact that the very first mons released were the Kantonian ones (well, you need to start somewhere), with the release of posterior generations, the amount of focus Gen 1 got was still unbalanced regarding the later generations:
  • The first post-Gen 1 mons added into the game were... Baby Pokémon belonging to Gen 1 evolutionary lines.
  • In 2020, nine out of eleven Community Day events featured Kantonian Pokémon, the sole exceptions being Piplup in January and Seedot in May. Not even those chosen through fan vote have the benefit of neither them nor the rivals they defeated being related to Gen 1, as Rhyhorn defeated Dratini, Vulpix (both Kantonian and Alolan) and Machop; Weedle and Gastly defeated Sandshrew (both Kantonian and Alolan) and Squirtle; and Porygon and Charmander defeated Grimer (both Kantonian and Alolan) and Caterpie.
  • Among the first eight Mega Evolutions introduced in 2020, only two of them belong to post-Gen 1 Pokémon (Houndoom and Abomasnow).
  • As of the Pokémon Go Tour 2021: Kanto, Kanto is the only region with all of its shiny forms released and available in either form.
• Foe Yay Shipping:
  • Unsurprisingly, the three team leaders are often shipped with each other. Downplayed, in that the leaders aren't necessarily enemies so much as rivals. Bonus points if they are expies of Mystery Dungeon teams.
  • Since the release of Team GO Rocket, some new pairings have shown up. Candela and Arlo, especially due to their backstory, is the most obvious one; but Spark x Sierra and Cliff x Arlo have also turned up so far.
  • Protagonist x GO Rocket Grunt is also a pairing.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • There's something of a mentor-student relationship between players of this game and Ingress, with players of the latter getting Go players new to Niantic's games up to speed with the basics such as how to find in-game locations and advising them to purchase external battery packs due to the exceptionally high rate at which Go depletes batteries. The other way around also applies: There are Go players who join Ingress, and in fact shortly after Go's launch there was an influx of new Ingress players.
  • Within the game: Teams Valor and Mystic both seem to be on better terms with Team Instinct than with each other. This is likely because Instinct is the smallest team by far, and thus seen as less of a threat.
  • Ingress Enlightened players who join Team Instinct and Valor tend to team up against Team Mystic, due to Mystic sharing the same team color as the Resistance.
  • Within Pokémon fandom, it is unsurprising to see a few Go players who are also part of Mystery Dungeon fanbase, since the elements of Go are similar to the certain elements of PMD games, especially the teams.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Gifts system, hands down. As long as you're friends with multiple people that play every day and amass enough gifts from Poké Stops to send them to you on a daily basis (provided you do the same), your pockets can be filled quickly with extremely powerful items (provided you're at Level 20 and above) that are much rarer than finding them at a Poké Stop, including Ultra Balls, Pinap Berries, Max Potions, and Max Revives. Even the Cap of 20 gifts each day won't stop you from obtaining a plethora of useful items.
  • Golden Razz berries, which fully restores a defender's motivation in a gym, can easily be abused. Someone attacking your gym? Simply feed a defender one of these once its motivation is close to zero. It's also unaffected by the distance penalties for remote feeding. Sure, there's a limit on how many berries you can feed, but since one has to battle a defender about three times before its motivation is depleted, any sane attacker would most likely give up after having their hard work repeatedly nullified.
  • In trainer battles, Giratina can take a ridiculous amount of punishment, resists a lot of damage types, and can rapidly charge Dragon Claw. It's not unheard of for Giratina to 2-for-1 an unprepared player.
• Gateway Series: Despite the Pokémon franchise being already established, and even though it only managed to retain a quarter of its launch popularity, this game still introduced lots of people to the Pokemon mainline games and world.
• Genius Bonus: A variation for Halloween event. For some people, especially those with environmental knowledge, the abundance of Gastly line during this period can reflect how polluted the real-life cities and suburbs have.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: This game is TREMENDOUSLY HUGE in Mexico, to the point where hundreds of thousands of Mexicans flocked to Mexico City just to play Pokémon Go.
• Goddamn Bats:
  • Zubat is just as annoying as it is in the main games, but for different reasons. When the game first launched, it was a Com Mon, but unlike more common monsters such as Pidgey and Ratatta, the number of candies required to evolve it into Golbat was 50 (changed to 25 when Crobat was introduced). As one of the flying Pokémon, it's harder to catch because it starts off further away and moves around constantly, which makes landing Great/Excellent throws harder. Most other fliers in the game are at least evolved forms that justify being harder to hit. Zubat essentially has all of the drawbacks of being common with none of the benefits (though, as noted in Complacent Gaming Syndrome, it's still decent as Crobat). Thankfully, Niantic toned down their spawn rate over time, though they also bumped it back up for the Halloween events.
  • Murkrow. Despite being easy to locate, their catch rates are abysmal compared to other common Pokémon. They also have an annoying tendency to flee despite being both common and hard to catch. Aipom suffer the same fate.
  • Hitmontop sidesteps back and forth even when it isn't attacking to deflect the balls. This makes it rather difficult to catch with a Poke Ball, especially when you're going for an Excellent throw or consecutive throws.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • One of the crashing issues can occur during the "will it stay in" part of catching a Pokémon. That said, it can lead to guaranteed captures if the RNG is on your side. The game now can recover from this bug and jump straight to success or failure to catch without waiting for the ball to wobble.
  • Sometimes the server will not immediately recognize a change in the game for a minute or two, such as what happens when players try using the Eevee Nickname Easter Egg and it fails since the server did not register the new name yet. However, this also can be used to a player's advantage, as rarely the game won't recognize a gym has been lost to another Team and you may still have a small window to claim it for rewards.
  • The app's ability to judge where and how far you've walked is pretty spotty. Negatively, it may not record your distance properly and cheat you out of the effort. Positively, you can set the phone down and it will record distance despite never moving.
  • For a while, Grimer had a notorious habit of crashing the game. Whether you brought up its Pokédex entry, saw it in a gym, or sometimes its silhouette in the sightings, the game would freeze. However this could be used to your advantage, as putting a Grimer in your gym would cause a lot of other players who came to challenge you to crash. It seems to have been fixed, at least for the majority of players.
  • The notorious EX Raid mechanic seem to be pretty sloppily programmed, resulting in quite a few bugs in the distribution of passes (which come in waves). Two waves were particularly weird:
    • The February 10/11, 2018 raids didn't have any criteria at all for selection, resulting in invitations to gyms merely visited at least once, many of which are located abroad for some people, or even overseas.
    • The March 9/10, 2018 raids seemed pretty normal, aside from the invitations coming two weeks in advance. Come March 8, and a new wave of invitations were sent out, also for March 10. Many players were invited for both. Unfortunately for some, both raids they were invited to were scheduled at the exact same time, meaning they had to choose one or the other, or, if the gyms were sufficiently close to each other, run to the next after completing the first raid.
    • It should also be noted that the EX-Raids are intended to be applicable to all legendaries starting from Articuno and Lugia. Thanks to the 2017 GoFest fail, this was changed to them being in normal raids thankfully.
  • The walking requirements for evolving Eevee into Espeon and Umbreon were accidentally removed on Thursday the 12th of August 2021, resulting in Eevee being able to evolve into Espeon or Umbreon as soon as you make it your buddy. As this coincided with the Eevee Community Day weekend, Niantic deliberately left it unfixed until the following Monday.
  • When Zorua debuted in 2022's Shuppet Spotlight Hour, it not only disguised as your partner Pokémon, it copied their IVs and moves too. For example, you could get a Zoroark with max stats and the powerhouse move Psystrike, if you had a Mewtwo with that setup already caught. Realizing how much of an obvious Game-Breaker this was, Niantic soft-banned the use of any illegal Zorua and Zoroark and, to make up for the issue, extended the duration Zorua spawned from the mere 5 minutes before and after Shuppet Spotlight Hour to the entire rest of the Halloween season.
• Growing the Beard: While Pokémon GO had its heyday during its debut in 2016, the game itself was widely criticized for its plethora of dysfunctional, broken, buggy and grindy features. In particular, the first Pokémon GO Fest was lambasted as a poorly-run event that simply couldn't work properly with the app. However, over the next few years, the game has gradually improved greatly - not only by adding more Pokémon, but also fine-tuning and polishing its mechanics while adding new features and new ways to progress. Long-requested features such as the Buddy system, trading, and PvP battles were finally implemented as well. As of the 2020's, with the controversy surrounding Pokémon Sword and Shield and Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, some fans will even argue that GO has surpassed the concurrent main series games in terms of quality and polish.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • When the game was released there were (and still are) many jokes about people being distracted while playing the game, making them easy crime targets... then the incident in Missouri happened where a group of armed muggers used the game to lure players in.
  • "There is a time and place for everything." This quote from Professor Oak about not simply riding your bicycle just about anywhere inappropriate has become eerily prophetic and fitting, as some players have been reported to exhibit a worrying amount of carelessness in playing while traveling, or worse, while driving.
• High-Tier Scrappy: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Hype Backlash: Has its own page.
• It's Popular, Now It Sucks!: This game has gotten flak for being as wildly popular as it is, both from people outside the fandom and hardcore Pokémon fans. From the non-fan side, people dislike it because it's a spin-off of a "kiddy" game that has managed to be extremely popular or because people see the game as an excuse to be reckless and/or disruptive, especially in more sensitive types of locations such as cemeteries and memorials. As for the hardcore fans, they dislike it because of the significant Newbie Boom, with many fans considering people who only have played Go to be playing it just because it's trending.
• Informed Wrongness: While the whole Shadow Pokémon business is definitely evil, it's hard to take Team Go Rocket's affairs in "invading Pokéstops" as bad. Grunts will make a deal about players "trespassing" at controlled Pokéstops, but won't actually do anything about it and will let the player off scott free if choose not to initiate a fight. They'll also gladly gladly announce that they're stealing from Pokéstops, but Pokéstops' items don't belong to anyone, are infinite in quantity, and aren't affected by the presence of Go Rocket, so there's no actual reason for players to see it that way. Heck, players that want items from Pokéstops will actually want Rocket members to invade, since beating them causes the Pokéstop they're invading to instantly recharge and offer more loot.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Some of the features of this game (like multiple factions to join and bases that spawn at landmarks to capture and defend) have led people to accuse if of being too similar to Ingress. Ironically, this also ends up driving the opposite trope as well, since existing Pokémon fans wanted something more like the main games.
• Junk Rare: See the series' sub-page here.
• Just Here for Godzilla:
  • Why was Pokémon Go so popular when it debuted? There wasn't a battle system like the main games, no story and it only had monsters from the first generation. However, the idea of catching and collecting these familiar monsters in real life is a big enough draw. This is especially true during the Generation III, IV and V releases, as many fan favorites such as Metagross, Lucario, Gardevoir and Chandelure joined when their respective generations launched. However, by the time those updates rolled around, the game had become much more fleshed-out, polished and feature-laden, leading to a higher retention rate.
  • There's people who join just for the in-person camaraderie that the game attracts.
• LGBT Fanbase:
  • The transgender community really took to the fact that instead of asking the age old question of "Are you a Boy or a Girl?" like the professors do in the main games, Prof. Willow instead asks you to pick your "Adventuring Style" when selecting the gender of your trainer avatar - especially since you can change your avatar's gender presentation at will, unlike in the main series at the time. Starting from Pokémon Sword and Shield, the main-line games would adopt this practice in the form of asking for your appearance.
  • When the Team Leader designs were revealed, nonbinary fans were drawn to Team Mystic's Blanche for their very androgynous design. Although originally stated as female, the character designer stating they were meant to have an androgynous design and promotional material beginning to be more ambiguous about their gender has furthered this.
  • Speaking of the Leaders, the fans have decided they like the idea of Blanche and Candela hooking up, as well as Spark and the default male player character. Really, the fact the Leaders, player characters, and even Prof. Willow are all quite athletic and good looking is a real draw for the gay crowd.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Memetic Badass: Bidoof. Niantic took this ball and ran with it, releasing a photo of a lone Bidoof staring down a Regigigas.
• Memetic Loser:
  • While all three teams get some heat from one another, Team Instinct (and, by extension, its leader Spark) was at first the most-often mocked as the weakest and dumbest. Though, Valor and Mystic really are not that far behind on this department, depending on their strength in your area. This has become subverted over time as the team ratios have evened out, though given Spark dabbing in official material amongst other things, the joking has become more good humoured.
  • Kecleon, due to being the one Hoenn mon to take ages to be released into the game, long after Gen 6 was announced. To put things in perspective, the first Gen 3 Pokémon were added in December 2017. Kecleon didn't debut in the game until January 2023, by which point even several Gen 8 Pokémon had been added to the game and Gen 9's Gimmighoul made an early in-game cameo.
• Memetic Mutation: So many that it gets its own page.
• Memetic Psychopath: Just what does Professor Willow do to the excess Pokémon that you give him? Many unsettling ideas have come forth, ranging from experimenting on them, to processing them into candy or building a Pokémon army for world conquest. Some fans Take a Third Option and have Willow selling Pokémon to buyers or something else.
• Misaimed Fandom: Many fans bemoan that the game relies so much on visiting local landmarks, when in truth this is the entire point of the game: encouraging exploration around the places players live. Though it is unfortunate that some players essentially cannot play because no Pokéstops exist where they live, geolocation is a fundamental aspect of Pokémon GO, and changes that enable playing in an area without visiting landmarks undercut its locational element.
• Mis-blamed:
  • Many problems with the game are attributed to Nintendo themselves, and the game is seen by many as a Japanese product, with players remarking that the game seems to have been designed for Japanese players where neighborhoods are generally safer. In reality, the actual developer, Niantic, is a U.S.-based company with experience with another ARG, and in fact the idea of a Pokémon ARG can be partially credited to them. This actually caused some financial trouble for Nintendo; they had to point out that not only did they not make the game, but that they only have a fraction of the stake in The Pokémon Company, and lost a lot of market value as a result.
  • And even amongst those who are aware that the game is a Niantic effort, some players, particularly those who have played Ingress, think they're still affiliated with Google, and as such point the blame at Google when things go wrong. Niantic actually went separate from Google in October 2015, well before Go's release.
  • The "Koffing at the National Holocaust Museum" incident is often blamed on Nintendo and Niantic, when in fact the generation of Pokémon is largely randomized; it simply happened to be a very bad coincidence. Also, quite a few people took issue with the person who took the picture saying they were offended, given that they had the enormous bad taste to be playing the game at the museum in the first place.
  • A thing that players like to blame on Niantic are ugly shinies, such as dirt green Dragonite and shinies that are just those of deeper or brighter coloration such as Garchomp, Gengar and Leafeon. In reality, Niantic has no decision on the Shiny colors; Game Freak decides them.
• More Popular Spin-Off:
  • While not necessarily more acclaimed by the core Pokémon fanbase, Pokémon GO's nature as an immersive freemium smartphone game that uses familiar characters has made it one of the most popular games period, with success more comparable to Candy Crush Saga and Grand Theft Auto V than modern main series Pokémon games. However, this could also be considered subverted, after estimates revealed that the main series games were in fact becoming more popular than ever due to Go's influence, to the point that Pokémon Sun and Moon became Nintendo's most pre-ordered games of all time.
  • Over the years, this trope resurged, albeit downplayed. While the main series Pokémon games have gotten flack for their poor polish and questionable design decisions, GO has gone in the exact opposite direction from a buggy, grindy mess to one of the best AR mobile games on the market thanks to its various updates. That said, it's hard to tell whether GO or the main series games are more popular on an absolute scale after the "fad" period died down.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The third shake of a Poké Ball, since a Pokémon is only able to break out after the first or second shake. If you heard that third shake, the Pokémon is yours!

N to Z

• Narm: Unlike in the 3DS games, you can play with your Mega-Evolved Buddy Pokémon outside of battle! Except Mega Evolutions use the same limited set of animations that they use in battle, breaking immersion and coming across as emotionless and robotic compared to their more expressive base forms. Even more baffling is that Mega Evolutions that are constantly flying/hovering do have walking/standing animations they use in the overworld, making one wonder why they don't use the standing animations when being interacted with.
• Narm Charm: Depending on who you ask, the GoFest 2020 Team Leader animatic can fall into this territory. Fans seem split over the quality itself; while many appreciated the last-minute pandemic-pressured video showing the Team Leaders going against the GO Rocket leaders, others were taken aback by what looked to be, in some of their words, “a Powerpoint presentation,” especially after seeing the much more appealing style of the GO Rocket introduction video from 2019. Still, both sides expressed enjoying the request to see more content focused on the leaders and their stories being fulfilled, and appreciated the details put into the characterization. The charm half of this trope comes into play with details like Sierra and Spark’s fight involving his Elekid vs her Houndoom, the bittersweet-yet-cryptic flashback between Candela and Arlo, and seeing Blanche's unflinching smirk for an extended period of time while battling Cliff.
• Never Live It Down:
  • A few overzealous fans have caused the whole base to be smeared as a bunch of Too Dumb to Live lemmings who'll mindlessly walk into traffic or over cliffs if it'll get them a better shot.
  • Team Instinct was, by far, the least popular team when the game launched. They've since caught up considerably, but fans still treat them as the Butt-Monkey of the three teams.
  • The game as a whole has suffered this as a result of its messy first year. Aside from the above-mentioned overzealous fans, the game was marred by its myriad of connection issues and bugs, Niantic's poor customer service, and the infamous Pokémon Go Fest 2017. While many of the game's issues have been resolved after 2017, many people still look down on the game as a vastly overrated fad (in spite of the fact that the game still maintains an active playerbase).
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The Lickitung event in February 2020, which consisted of every gym being invaded by a Rank 4 Lickitung. The sight of all those gyms being occupied by a horde of pink kaiju manages to unintentionally evoke images of an infestation.
  • Shortly after the Swirlix, Spritzee, and Goomy lines were added to the game, some players reported a bug where their Swirlix buddies' bodies were rotating on the Quick Treat screen, which is every bit as creepy as it sounds.
  • The advertisement for the Go Fest 2022 Finale on the 27th of July in the same year fully displays how ethereal and horrifying Ultra Beasts can be. It shows five "recordings" of Ultra Beast activities in Tokyo, Berlin, Seattle and Sapporo, and they're made in the style of classic alien/cryptid sighting videos. The first two, featuring a woman sighting a Nihilego and a Pheromosa dashing across the streets of Berlin are scary enough because of their fuzzy quality. However, the ones after these are just terrifying. The third recording has a man recording a Buzzwole standing on top of the Space Needle, flexing its muscles before another Buzzwole jumps right in front of the man and attacks him, with the man shouting "WHAT IS THAT THING MAN!?" before the recording cuts off. The fourth one has an office building in Sapporo suffering from a power outage... which turns out to be a Xurkitree who latched itself right next to the building, and doesn't even hesitate attacking the man recording it. Finally, we're back to the Nihilego again and when the woman recording the Nihilego tries to touch it, it almost manages to approach her ^note If the mainline games are of any indication, given what Nihilego does to anyone it contacts, the possibility isn't pleasant before it flies up, and there's now a whole swarm of Nihilego.
    • Celesteela, Kartana, and Guzzlord received similar "recordings" prior to the Steel-type "Test Your Mettle" event that September. Celesteela is shown floating merrily through a foggy city without a care in the world before ominously turning to face the people recording it, never once actually attacking anyone but looking nonetheless intimidating. Meanwhile, Guzzlord is shown eating scrap in a construction site (while mercifully ignoring the crowd watching it), only for Kartana to appear and suddenly lunge at the person holding the camera feet-first, with the person audibly starting to scream in panic before the video cuts off (which, given the type of Ultra Beast that Kartana is, leaves all manner of nasty implications).
    • File 08: UB-05 GLUTTON | REEMERGENCE is another Guzzlord "recording" made right before its official release in Pokémon GO, and it's even worse than the previous one. A Guzzlord partially emerges from an Ultra Wormhole on top of a Japanese carnival trying to grab whatever it could eat, leaving nothing but freaked out passerby scrambling to escape in its wake. When it emerges fully from the wormhole, it pounces towards the person recording it and seemingly squashes them flat point-blank before the video cuts off.
  • The skybox for the 2022 Psychic Spectacular event looks a lot like Color Out of Space (2020). It varies with each Pokemon encounter, so you could see a regular sky with just a tinge of pink for one and huge magenta nebulas looming overhead for another; fitting for the Psychic types featured, but still freaky for some.
  • Team GoRocket may not seem much... Except this is the same Giovanni that once led Team Rainbow Rocket: the real world is where he's unleashing his evil schemes next.
• Obvious Beta: The initial release was pretty rough. There were constant crashing issues, the servers were unstable, and the app was (and in many cases still is) a massive battery and data hog. The initial release was even versioned as 0.29.0, which is a number typical of a beta build.
• Older Than They Think:
  • Many of the game's innovative aspects are nothing new to anyone who's played Ingress. In fact, nearly all the Pokéstops and Gyms are recycled Ingress portals; hence churches typically having a Pokéstop or gym.
  • Though Eeveelutions didn't appear in the wild in the main games until Pokémon Sword and Shield, they were recruitable in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon before this.
  • Catching Pokémon without battling it first, and just throwing Poke Balls and berries until it's either caught or runs away is nearly identical to the Safari Zone mechanics of the older Pokémon games.^note Bait was thrown to make a Pokémon less likely to run but harder to catch, and a rock was thrown to make it easier to catch but more likely to run.
  • This isn't the first Mons game to use augmented reality — that would be the PSP-exclusive inviZimals franchise, which began back in 2010.
  • This isn't the first Mons game to use geolocation to determine which ones appear either, Geomon did it first.
  • And, to top it off, it's not the first Mons game with geolocation that specifically uses the Pokémon property. Google had an April Fools game where players had to find Pokémon by zooming in on Google Maps.
• One True Pairing: Mere hours after their full reveals, Candela and Blanche became the subjects of a massive wave of fanart shipping them together. The fact that their respective teams have the most pronounced rivalry of the trio only seems to be adding fuel to the fire.
• One True Threesome: It's extremely popular to pair all the team leaders together.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • Players can feel the need to check their game constantly, just in case a rare Pokémon may have wandered into their proximity that wasn't there when they checked two minutes ago.
  • Is your team in control of a nearby Gym? Let's hope that person who's walking by you with their phone out isn't playing for an enemy team.
  • If you've heard the stories about criminals using Pokémon Go to lure players into their demise via PokéStop, chances are seeing a Lure being used at a PokéStop at 1:00 AM can be this. Especially if said PokéStop is off the beaten path.
  • This can affect non-players as well, but random strangers looking over your shoulder and trying to peek at your phone screen to see if you're playing the game like they are. Very annoying if you're not playing the game and doing something private on your phone (texting, looking up confidential information, etc.).
  • The 7/20/17 update featured a glitch that replaced Team Instinct's leader, Spark's, artwork with the artwork from team Valor's leader, Candela. There's no indication of this glitch happening for Instinct members, they could just check on the stats on their Pokémon and Candela shows up suddenly talking just like Spark. With Team Valor's reputation for being power-driven and hot-blooded, one could be worried that Candela secretly kidnapped poor Spark and just casually replaced his role, in an attempt to merge the underrepresented Instinct to her own team.
  • Later community days also have exclusive moves, which more often than not makes Pokémon complete upgrades over themselves. For example, Metagross hits like a wet noodle because it has bad charged moves, but with the Community Day Meteor Mash, it is among one of the best Pokémon in the game. To make things worse, the moves are exclusive and there is usually no chance for you to get the move if you missed it, or even worse... accidentally TM it, crippling your Pokémon forever. This makes lots of people avoid evolving their high IV Pokémon before community days in the fear of having their Pokémon obsolete, and for a good reason. Eventually Double Subverted with the introduction of the Too Awesome to Use Elite TMs allowing people to give their mons previously exclusive Community Day and event-only attacks. Their rarity makes them highly sought after, though.
  • An odd example involving non-players. With the game largely forgotten, it's no longer on most peoples' radars. Despite this, there remain devotees who continue to play, including adults. However, especially in rural or suburban areas, seeing solitary adult men repeatedly hanging around the same random spot can make many people assume they're casing a robbery or, worse, a potential kidnapper and/or sex offender. The addition of a feature to nominate new PokéStops, which involves taking a couple of photos of whatever you want to be a Stop, made this even worse. Especially considering the most common object of PokéStop nominations, as they're quite ubiquitous, particularly in suburbs, are playgrounds. The paranoia in that case goes both ways; nominating playgrounds can not only make residents suspicious, but the submitters paranoid of Paedo Hunters.
• Player Punch:
  • If a Pokémon runs away from an encounter, it is marked in your Journal as a failed encounter until you do enough activity to knock it off the list.
  • If you successfully defeat a Raid Pokémon not owned previously but fail to catch it, your Pokédex will mark it down as seen- this is the only way to get "Seen" entries in the Dex for Legendaries which can feel gutwretching when you skim through and see that one Legendary that you missed.
• Popular Game Variant: On Discord servers, one popular way to play during Community Days is to see who can find the relevant Pokémon that fills a certain criteria: the largest one, the lightest one, one with certain stats, etc. This became a part of the game itself in mid-2023 with the Showcase feature, in which players compete with their local community to place their largest/smallest/heaviest/lightest Pokémon of a certain species at a Pokéstop, and the players get rewarded with in-game items based on this.
• Portmanteau Couple Name: The popular pairing of Spark/Male Trainer has been christened "GoSpark" by the Twitter fandom, using the Fan Nickname of "Go-kun" for the name of the MT.
• The Scrappy: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Has its own page.
• Silent Majority: Even though many on the internet claim the app as Condemned by History, Pokémon GO remains popular, and there are still many people who would go out to search for Pokémon every day. Niantic reports that while it doesn't match the game's peak popularity of 200 million players, about 15 to 20 million still log in daily, and new downloads are slow but steady. Playerbase-wide events for special bonuses also still tend to be finished very quickly.
• "Stop Having Fun" Guys:
  • After the game's launch, there were reports of players who take the game way too seriously, camping out at Gym locations, being verbally abusive towards others players who try and beat the Gym they've claimed, and sometimes even grabbing other player's cell phones out of their hands because they were about to catch a rare Pokémon in the area that they, themselves, wanted (not knowing that Pokémon spawns aren't limited to a single player, they are available until they despawn naturally and as many players can catch the same spawn as is needed).
  • One may encounter people, or groups of people, who "claim ownership" to Gyms or areas of Gyms, and may get personal when the Gym they're currently occupying is under attack and they haven't hit the threshold for max coins of the day, even if they're only losing out on a few coins.
• Tear Jerker: During the Halloween event, Cubone and Marowak gained a spike in spawn rates. This becomes tearjerking to anyone who knows about their backstory.
• That One Achievement:
  • Early on, "Depot Agent", which requires you to catch 200 Steel-type Pokémon to get all three ranks. There are only two Steel-types available in Generation One: Magnemite and its evolved form Magneton, neither of which is a common find. The Gen II update helped a bit by introducing Skarmory, Scizor, Forretress, and Steelix, but it remains a frustrating achievement to obtain. Gen III finally soothed some of the agony by making Aron fairly common.
  • By the same token, "Hex Maniac". There were only four Ghost-type Pokémon — Gastly, Haunter and Gengar plus Misdreavus — from two evolutionary lines, and all are difficult to find. The 2016 Halloween event temporarily rectified this by increasing the Gastly line's spawn rate, though the odds of catching 200 over a week can be pretty slim, depending on the player's schedules, and the 2017 Halloween event introduced the Generation III Ghost-types (Sableye, Shuppet, and Duskull and their evolutions). Niantic also made Misdreavus from Gen II a common spawn.
  • Likewise for "Dragon Tamer", the Dragon medal, which for the first year and a half had only the rare Dratini line and Kingdra, which can take a good deal of work (and, for the latter, a rare item spawn) to evolve from its not-too-common preevolutions. Mitigated in areas that, as of Generation III, find Trapinch to be common spawns, as well as events and the Windy weather making the type more common.
  • Prior to Generation III, "Delinquent" (200 Dark types) had similar issues. Due to the lack of Dark-types (even by Retcon, unlike Steel and Fairy), it wasn't at all available until Generation II launched, and it had nearly the same issues that "Hex Maniac" had - while two Dark-types (Murkrow and Sneasel) were common in some areas, this was far from universal, and they were compounded by having abysmal catch rates. The 2017 Halloween event mitigated this by improving the spawn rates of Dark-types and introducing a Generation III Dark-type (Sableye). Finally rectified with the broader launch of Generation III which introduced easily caught Poochyena as a Com Mon, as well as the Alolan formes introducing Alolan Rattata as a common spawn.
  • "Pikachu Fan" requires catching 200 Pikachu for all three ranks. Slightly better than the above in terms of rarity, but not by much, though numerous accessory variant events did help.
  • "Rocker" (200 Electric-types) isn't much better. Prior to Generation III updates, uncommon Chinchou aside, most Electric-types, like the aforementioned Magnemite and Pikachu and especially Mareep^note Mareep isn't rare in main-series at best, but its encounter rate gets heavily nerfed in GO, were extremely rare. This was mitigated in Generation III update when Electrike was added into one of the more-common Pokémon spawns.
  • "Youngster" and "Fisherman" are even worse, as not only do you have to catch the (admittedly common) Rattata and Magikarp, respectively, the Rattata must have the XS tag to count and the Magikarp must have the XL tag, and you have no way to control when those tags will appear. 200 is thus more like 600 (and that's assuming an even spread of possible tags), which is a lot of Rattata and Magikarp.
  • "Purifier" is awful to get, too. To get it, you need to purify 500 shadow Pokémon. This means beating at least 500 Team Rocket grunts/leaders, managing to catch all their Pokémon successfully, and then spending Stardust to purify the Pokémon. While some only require 1,000 Stardust to purify, the vast majority require 3,000 or 5,000. So on top of the tedious process of finding Rocket grunts and beating them, getting this achievement will run you around 1.5 million Stardust to get.
  • Then there's the absolute worst offender of them all: Unown. This Pokémon is based on the English alphabet, and has 28 forms for every letter plus ? and !. The Unown medal requires catching each of those forms. Good luck with that. Heck, good luck getting the medal to appear at all, since it's hidden until you've caught at least one Unown and the Pokémon is so rare that most players haven't even seen it on Nearby, let alone in a gym. It's even rarer than wild Tyranitar.
  • The 2021 update created a whole new category of achievements: Platinum Medals. While only one step above Gold, the requirements are many tiers above what was needed previously. For example, the catching medals increased from "Catch 200 X-type Pokémon" to "Catch 2,500 X-type Pokémon". These are doable, if lengthy. Others might take a bit longer. For example, the "Jogger" medal went from walking 1,000 km for the gold to needing to walk 10,000 km, over 6,200 miles, for the platinum. That's nearly a fourth of the total distance around the world (equatorial or meridional circumferences, both are a little over 40,000 km)! Hope you have adventure sync enabled.
  • The medals for winning Pokémon showcases are this, since you have to place first in them for it to count, which can be difficult if you have a lot of competition. It also doesn't help that you can only enter a few at a time.
• That One Attack: Any defender or raid boss that carries a counter-coverage move will be significantly tougher to take down for its counters, with the most notorious examples listed below:
  • Blissey with Dazzling Gleam. While her bulk alone makes her very difficult to take down in her own right, Dazzling Gleam gives her surprising firepower on top of it: a two-bar 100 base attack move that's super-effective against Fighting-types, whom are the only Pokémon that possess STAB on the moves super-effective against it, Dragon-types, whom make for the best generalists to sweep gyms, and Dark-types, whom one of its strongest Pokémon, Tyranitar, resists all of Blissey's other moves. Even Pokémon that take neutral damage from it will worn down by successive streams of Dazzling Gleam, and the only ones that would resist it are generally too slow to take it down within the time limit.
  • Slaking with Body Slam is extremely dangerous and is even worse than its Play Rough variants since it will constantly spam it; It travels at very high speeds and Slaking will continuously spam the attack. It's even worse than Snorlax's one since Slaking's attack is high enough to make Body Slam strip around 1/6 of a Raikou or Mamoswine's health bar.
  • Kyogre with Blizzard will make short work of Grass and Dragon-types, which are often fielded to resist Kyogre's Water attacks, and in the former case, score super effective damage on Kyogre. This leaves other Water-types as the only things that can endure Kyogre's moveset without risk of getting one-shot, but with Kyogre itself being resistant to their attacks, this can lead to a drawn-out battle which can end in a time-out. There's one outlier to this: Your own Kyogre, albeit with Thunder as a charge move, but Kyogre still doesn't completely solve problems on its own. This is fortunately later administered with the addition of Magnezone, which is easier to obtain than most Electric types, resists Blizzard and hits back very well with its powerful Wild Charge.
  • Mewtwo with Focus Blast, a Fighting-type move which makes short work of all Dark-types, one of the three types Mewtwo is weak against. Hoping to gnaw Mewtwo to death with Tyranitar? The latter Pokémon is doubly weak to Fighting-type moves, reducing it to a Glass Cannon at best, Cannon Fodder at worst. Gengar isn't a consideration either: despite immunity to Focus Blast, it's weak against both of Mewtwo's fast moves, Psycho Cut and Confusion. The only viable counter to a Focus Blast Mewtwo is another Mewtwo with the Shadow Ball charge move, which can only be obtained by using an Elite TM on an already caught one, or catching one during events where Mewtwos with this attack can be obtained. Thankfully, you now have Giratina Origin forme, which not only has high amounts of DPS thanks to having Gengar's infamous legacy moveset, it also has high enough bulk to outright laugh at Focus Blast in addition to an immunity to it, so if it returns, this is less of a problem.
  • Any Dragon with a Dragon type charged move falls into this category too, since their attack is so absurdly high that they can rip through even extremely tough Pokémon in a single charged move. To make things worse, since Fairy and Ice types are often ineffective in this game, you are usually forced to use Dragon types against them and they can knock out your Dragons faster than you can fire charged moves, as Dragon is weak to Dragon. This is made worse by the dodge glitch, which means that any Dragon type raid boss will knock out your Dragons without fail. The worst is, in fact, Draco Meteor Dialga, since fairies are ineffective against it, and it can OHKO or 2HKO nearly any Pokémon without fail, and can most certainly OHKO even maxed Machamps.
• That One Boss: Too many, to the point it has its own page.
• That One Level: Timed events cause Pokémon that are harder to catch to spawn more frequently compared to normal, increasing the amount of stronger Balls and Berries you'll likely need to scoop them all up in one go. A few examples:
  • Community Days, hosted once a month, each have one Pokémon in the spotlight. The most common subjects are Pokémon with naturally low catch rates including starters and pseudo-legendaries likely to not stay inside a thrown Poké Ball unless you manage a Great or Excellent throw and/or use higher-tier resources.
  • In December, Delibird, a Pokémon otherwise dormant through the entire rest of the year, spawn en mase. Delibird can be a pain in an ass for many players to catch and can easily cause a Game Over for the player, requiring finding another one.
  • The Kanto-themed event that occurred from April 10th to April 17th of 2018 not only turned the usual Com Mons into rare finds, but drastically increased the encounter rate of Kanto's lesser to almost non-available but harder to catch Mons, including the Starter trio and Pikachu.
  • The Pokémon Detective Pikachu event caused a massive surge in the population of Aipom, which, if you've been taking notes, has only a catch rate of 45- making them a pain to catch without risking them breaking out and darting away. It's also arguably the event's signature 'Mon next to Detective Pikachu, as Aipom's Shiny form was released alongside the event.
• That One Sidequest:
  • The March 30, 2018 update added a quest system, with the primary quest chain leading to catching Mew. However, several of the subquests that need to be completed to catch Mew have caused much hair-pulling among players. The ones most likely to result in frustration are the fifth-tier "Catch a Ditto" quest (as it's impossible to know whether a Com Mon is actually a Ditto in disguise until someone successfully catches it - fortunately for social players, a Ditto is always a Ditto for anyone trying to catch that particular spawn), the fifth-tier "Catch 10 Ghost-Types" quest (while more common than they used to be, see That One Achievement for the difficulties in finding them - as of Generation III, there are still only nine in the game, with four of those being evolutions), and the sixth-tier "Evolve a Magikarp" quest (hope you saved 400 Magikarp candies before quests launched).
    • The Kanto Celebration in 2017 managed to remedy some of these issues by dramatically increasing the spawn rates of Magikarp and Gastly everywhere.
  • On top of the quest system are quests that are much easier to obtain and complete, but some are frustrating enough for a player to discard them on sight.
    • "Perform X throw types in a row" where missing or getting your Ball deflected, which happens without warning, will reset your quest progress.
    • "Catch X (Type) Pokémon" in places or occasions where the types asked for are unlikely to spawn, especially in the case of Electric, Ghost and Dragon-types.
    • Depending on situation, a quest saying "Hatch x number of eggs," "Earn X number of candies walking with a buddy" or "Win/battle in X raid(s)" can be impossible or waste huge amounts of time to complete. For example, Legendary Pokémon only give one candy for every 20 km of walking, making it much easier to do for relatively common Pokémon.
    • What's more, these types of missions often spout out some of the rarest Pokémon you can find as a reward while in other times, they are just worthless Pokémon such as Minun and Doduo.
    • And when these quests are compulsory they will give you a headache. Two involve making an Excellent Curveball throw: one in the seventh tier of "A Mythical Discovery" and three in the sixth tier of "A Thousand-Year Slumber". The third tier of "A Thousand-Year Slumber" also deserves a mention with one of the quests being "Make 3 Great Throws in a Row".
    • One that came about due to poor timing on Niantic's part was, oddly, the second tier of the Jirachi quest line. One of the three quests for the second tier was to catch three Whismur. Ordinarily, Whismur are Com Mons, so no problem, right? The problem is that, less than 24 hours after the Jirachi quests launched, Niantic started the 2019 Water Festival, greatly boosting the visibility and spawn rates of Water-types, which had the side effect of making normal spawns rare-to-non-existent. If you didn't manage to unlock the second tier quickly enough, or just didn't luck into finding three Whismur in time, you basically stalled on getting Jirachi until the end of the Water Festival. Also, which common spawns happen most frequently rotate, so if Whismur are out of rotation when the player lands this quest, it could take a couple weeks before this one can be completed.
  • The "A Colossal Discovery" line of quests that could be purchased via a ticket include three missions on each tier that requires obtaining a Regirock, Regice, or Registeel (with the goal to have one of each at the end) specifically through a Raid Battle. All the problems associated with trying to locate and even do a 5-tier raid alongside catching the Pokémon afterwards come out ten-fold. And you cannot cheese the mission by acquiring the Regis through trading or Research Breakthrough (even if you had them previously)- you must partake in the Raids to get them. Thankfully, after the event day ended, the quests were modified to have more simplistic, if repetitive, completion conditions.
  • "A Drive to Investigate" is a special series of quests that lets you get Genesect early if you buy a ticket for it. Each quest set requires you to capture 25 Pokémon of specific types and it has to be done four times, which means you'll chuck out 100 balls or more by the end of the quest chains. This can easily exhaust your supply of balls unless you have plenty to spare. What's worse, the quest came out during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, which led to lockdowns across the world, meaning fewer players were able to venture outside to find Pokémon or spin Poké Stops to restock on balls.
  • The fourth anniversary event included weekly special research. For the first week, clearing the first three levels opened up an elite level. Two of the elite level quests - catch 100 Pokémon and catch 25 different species of Pokémon - were time-consuming but fairly reasonable. The last, though, might go down in infamy as the most ridiculous research task ever - make fifty Excellent Throws. On a time-limited quest where you had at most a week to complete it. Combining this with Bonus Feature Failure, the reward for landing all 50 Excellent Throws was only 5 Ultra Balls. In comparison, the standard "Make An Excellent Throw" research task is potentially worth 2 Ultra Balls - the special research was worth only 5% of the standard version of the task. (Technically, it also opened up the "tier clear" bonus as well... but as that was worth stardust and experience equal to five no-bonus unevolved Pokémon catches, it still was worth nothing compared to what normal play would get). Many players who unlocked the elite level didn't even bother trying to complete it.
  • If a Special Research task involves the leaders of Team GO Rocket, you are required to beat all three of them to clear it. While the leaders appear often from hot air balloons making them easier to find, they're surprisingly difficult to fight proper and a huge leap in difficulty compared to the Grunts (and the similarly weak Jessie and James), and you'll sometimes find duplicates of the same leader if you rely on the balloons.
  • Part 2 of the All-in-One quest has numerous tasks the player has to complete. "Catch a Pokémon 30 days in a row" is easy enough and "Catch 151 different species of Pokémon" is a bit time consuming but doable. The rest of the tasks requires the player to catch 30 Pokémon of every single type, which includes types whose Pokémon rarely spawn in the wild or in raids like Fairy and Ice. Catching dual type Pokémon helps a little bit, but not by a whole lot.
  • The "Seasons of Legends" research questline requires you to take snapshots of Landorus, Tornadus, and Thundurus. This, of course, requires you to obtain the three of them, either through raids or trading. Their raids were only available for two non-consecutive weeks that season, and then weren't available again for two years (and again, for only a week each). If you missed out on them and couldn't trade for them, you're shit outta luck.
  • Every level after 40 requires completing four Research Assignments, some of which can be exceptionally time-consuming or difficult.
    • In order to reach Level 47, players have to win a three-star raid using only Pokémon with 1500 CP or less, when players will likely be hard-pressed to defeat the boss in time with pokemon with twice that amount of CP that attack the boss's weaknesses with STAB.
    • In order to reach Level 50, players have to catch a Legendary Pokémon in their next five Legendary Pokémon encounters. Considering how hard legendaries are to catch and how easily they flee, this is even worse than getting five consecutive excellent throws.
  • Level 45 has a special research assignment that requires you to get eight consecutive great curveball throws, when most throw-related research assignments require no more than five consecutive throws, regardless of quality.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • A common complaint about the battle and catching systems. Gym battles feel more like a stripped down fighting game than an RPG, using an unusual attack-and-dodge mechanic. Catching involves throwing Poké Balls until either the Mon is caught or runs away after a failed catch. While catching Pokémon isn't quite the typical way for the games, it's pretty close to how the Safari Zone worked in earlier games.
  • Taken to an extreme with the July 30th 2017 update. The glitched in-game tracking system was removed and third-party tracking websites were taken down, making it nearly impossible to track down Pokémon. In addition, the update also decreased the range of the detection circle around the avatar by about 30%, meaning you now have to get even closer to find Pokémon that you already have no way of accurately tracking, not to mention using PokéStops and Gyms. There are also other unconfirmed claims about the update, such as state Gyms and PokéStops were removed, and a drastic increase in the difficulty of obtaining Pokémon. Needless to say, the update did not go over very well. However, some people believed that such a reaction was incredibly short-sighted, which turned out to be true when the following update began to add an improved tracking system (as long as you live in San Francisco) and Niantic specified that the greater difficulty in capturing was due to a bug.
  • The November 7th 2017 update made spinning Pokéstops while driving prohibited. This resulted in a huge backdraft on Reddit, calling Niantic out on making it impossible for them to use their GO Pluses.
  • The Nerf of the Eevee Brothers Easter Egg. This means any new player who is attempting to get all three is reduced to pure dumb luck while early players were able to more or less get them effortlessly. While some don't see this as a big deal because the game had already reached its peak playerbase by that point, others (particularly those late to the party or who only found out about the trick after its removal) are pretty miffed that they can't benefit from the trick, especially since it only worked once for each of the Eeveelutions. A similar Easter egg being added for the Gen 2 Eeveelutions along with the original being put back has eased tensions over the subject.
  • The revision of the Gym system was met with mixed reception. On one hand, there is no longer a need to grind Prestige as each Gym now always has 6 slots, and while a single Pokémon may need to be beaten several times over to expel it, its effective CP drops with each victory, making it easier to defeat each time. On the other hand, rewards for defending Gyms are now dependent on how long your Pokémon defends a Gym for, making it nigh-impossible to get anything in Gyms with a high turnover rate, and players are now capped at 50 coins per day as opposed to 100.
  • The trading system introduced in June 2018. Unlike the mainline Pokémon games, you can't just transfer Pokémon freely and call it a day- you and your partner now have to pay Stardust based on if the Pokémon you're trading for is already in your PokéDex, if it isn't, and if it's Legendary, Purified/Shadow (the difference between the two being that Shadow Pokémon cannot be traded at all) or Mythical (the last of which cannot be traded for at all except for Meltan and Melmetal). It also puts a one-day limit on so-called "Special Trades" for Legendaries and Pokémon not in your Pokédex, limiting them to just one a day. Lastly, rather than keeping the stats of your Mon the same, it now randomizes their stats; if you're lucky you could get a much better Pokémon than the one you traded (and if the game feels like it, your Pokémon may indeed be tagged as lucky, which halves the Stardust powerup cost), and/or viceversa, however there's also the unfortunate chance of lowering the CP and IVs of the Pokémon being traded, completely invalidating their usefulness (if any) in battling.
  • Un-evolved hat or accessory-wearing Pokémon (typically Pikachu) released during events were once able to evolve, but midway through 2019 and in full the following year, next to every hat or costume Pokémon released completely lacks evolution capabilities of any sort from their evolutions not existing in the game's code.
  • Through the first four generations/regions of Pokémon GO, large numbers of Pokémon were added in waves and led to nearly all of a region's Pokémon being added by the time it was time to update to the next generation/region. When Generation V was adapted, the system changed to rolling out one line of Pokémon (sometimes two) each event and pump the number of events held in the game up. This new system severely slowed down the speed in which new species were added, and when it was time to adapt Generation VI including Mega Evolutions, Generation V was missing more single Pokémon and evolution lines than other generations were during the transition into the next one.
  • A December 2019 update brought a revamp of the Buddy system which now forces players to "play" with their buddy using the augmented reality system with your phone's camera (discharging your phone's battery even faster), where you have to feed a handful of berries to earn a limited window of time to walk around, among other benefits. Not using the augmented reality feature is not an option: the only small mercy is you can use Quick Treat or disable AR+ to make the augmented reality bare-bones in order to speed up the process, but even still...
    • The fact that after reaching a certain level with your buddy they do their "happy" animation every time you feed them a berry doesn't help, as it makes feeding them even more time consuming. And yes, this happens with Quick Treat as well.
  • When coin development was nerfed for Australian players to test a new coin feature, the backlash was intense, leading to (increased) death threats towards Niantic, boycott threats, and concerns from neutral players over the app's possible premature end mid-way through the well-received Throwback events. It was declared a failure in October 2020, and has since been scrapped.
  • In August 2021, a change made to the game due to the COVID-19 Pandemic that also added a range of accessibly previously not present was reverted in the United States and New Zealand. During the early stages of the pandemic, the range of the circle that surrounds the player on the overworld was (technically) doubled, allowing interactions with PokéStops and Gyms further away. With many countries easing on restrictions in 2021, Niantic changed the PokéStop and Gym interaction distance back to what it was pre-pandemic in those two countries; all of the other countries continue to have the increased PokéStop and Gym interaction distances.
  • The same month saw an update where the aspect of your Buddy bringing you gifts from PokéStop became severely Nerfed. Prior to that update, Buddy Pokémon would bring up to five gifts from any PokéStop or Gym on the screen up to three times a day. This changed to only one gift at a time.
  • When the June 2022 Deino Community Day introduced a raid that would be blocked from having Remote Raid Passes used on them (a unique 4-star Zweilous raid, which also had a new 10-player minimum limit that had never been seen before), the playerbase flew into a panic. Although said raid had the added bonus of spawning Deino around the gym if won, the playerbase nevertheless worried that this would set a precedent for further raids (especially Legendary raids or raids for regional Pokémon) similarly having remote raiding disabled, or even remote raids (considered one of the game's best QoL additions) being phased out of the game completely.
  • In late March of 2023, Niantic announced that remote raiding would be heavily nerfed. The price of 3-remote pass bundles was increased by 75% (individual passes' cost was nearly doubled) and remote raiders would be limited to 5 remote raids a day. Remote raiders were frustrated that their primary source of raid participation suddenly became much more expensive, and local raiders were annoyed that they couldn't bring in remote raider assistance as easily. Niantic stated that the changes were made in order to bring the game's focus back on local communities and make the game's primary geolocation element more relevant, but the playerbase expressed widespread disapproval. The changes' announcement got #HearUsNiantic to trend on Twitter in an attempt to prevent them, and a ton of players expressly Rage Quit because of the changes.
  • The April 2024 update overhauled the game's graphics, featuring new overworld backgrounds and avatar customization options. While the new backgrounds were well-received, the new avatar models were met with intense backlash from the userbase. Among the complaints were the more realistic faces being seen as creepy, the hair and skin tones being desaturated, and the new models having overlooked visual bugs.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: When costumed variant Pikachu and other Pokémon released from Straw Hat Pikachu onwards lost the ability to evolve, their stats and movepools were not modified to accommodate for this change, unlike the Partner Pokémon from Pokémon Let's Go, Pikachu! and Let's Go, Eevee! that also cannot evolve but in turn were made much stronger than normal Pikachu and Eevee and have access to new exclusive moves to hit even more types super effectively. In GO, all Pikachu and so forth with a hat/accessory that can't evolve perform identically to one without one and share the same pools of Fast and Charged attacks as the normal variants.
• Tough Act to Follow: Even years after release despite all the early issues and controversy, and even with a heavy reduction in its playerbase, Pokémon Go still maintains a massive player base and mind share amongst people throughout the world with a degree of success very, very, few games in any console, let alone mobile platforms, have been able to match, even by mobile standards. To say that the mobile games Nintendo has planned for its other IPs have the bar set high for them would be putting it lightly.
• Ugly Cute: The strange new Pokémon that appeared at the end of September 2018's Chikorita Community Day, Meltan, appears to be a gold nut on top a grey blob body, with a floating marble in center of the nut and a red wire tail sticking out the behind. It's such an unorthodox and just plain weird design that many have compared it to the Ultra Beasts, but its small size and animations make it appear endearing as well.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Purification became this over time. Initially it was a good idea to purify a Pokémon: Shadow Pokémon have an overall tripled cost for powering up and secondary attack, very low CP as a consequence of their low power up level (between Lvl1 and Lvl5), the worst charged attack of the entire game in Frustration (which couldn't be removed at all back then), and they couldn't be traded; Purified Pokémon, on the other hand, have a 10% overall discount on candy and stardust cost, are reasonably powered up at Lvl25, one of the (then) best charged attacks in the game in the form of Return (which could be changed with another attack by using a Charged TM), and could be traded (though the trade would count as special). Over time, however, Shadow Pokémon got a 20% attack bonus (and a 20% HP/Defense penalty in order to compensate) and the possibility to get Frustration removed at certain Team GO Rocket-themed events, while all Purified Pokémon got was... them being able to be mega evolved, a mechanic that they can't utilize in either form of Player Versus Player via the battle league and gyms. The purification process itself is also costly: while regular Pokémon would cost between 1 candy and 1000 stardust and 5-5000, Legendary Pokémon would cost 20 candies and 20000 stardust. As a result, many Pokémon gained a lot of viability as Shadow, and a lot of players don't bother purifying Shadow Pokémon.
• Unexpected Character:
  • While not exactly unprecedented, many players were surprised when Alolan forms were announced to be arriving to Go during Gen III. (Though granted, this is a somewhat unusual case as it was less that the playerbase wasn't expecting the forms to be in the game at all and more that the playerbase wasn't expecting the Alolan forms to arrive this soon to the game; generally expecting them to arrive much closer to when Gen VII mons would be added to Go.)
    • In the same vein, Galar Weezing being added to the game after the Chimchar Community Day as a Level 4 Raid Boss. Furthermore, datamining also revealed the existence of both Galar Zigzagoon and Galar Linoone, and during the April/May 2020 regional events it was confirmed the presence of Galarian Stunfisk, Galarian Meowth and Galarian Darumaka. Furthermore, both Galarian Linoone and Galarian Meowth will be able to evolve onto their Galarian evolutions, Perrserker and Obstagoon, respectively.
  • Heart Spinda, which was a One-Scene Wonder from an obscure 2004 Advance Generation episode, became a limited-addition form for the 2019 Valentines Day event. Catching it requires five Great Curveballs in a row, however.
  • The release of the Lake Guardian trio from Generation IV (Azelf, Mesprit, and Uxie) was expected... however, as every other legendary had been released either as a Raid Boss or as a Research Encounter, absolutely nobody expected the three to be released as a wild encounter. While not quite as surprising, each one was assigned to a different region, also a first for a Legendary Pokémon.
  • To commemorate the release of Mewtwo Strikes Back—Evolution in Japan, Armored Mewtwo was added as a five-star raid boss on July 10, 2019 (Two days before the theatrical release) until July 31, 2019. Even more surprising, this'll be that version of Mewtwo's overseas debut before its actual debut.
  • The addition of Team GO Rocket wasn't exactly a surprise. What was, however, was the inclusion of Shadow Pokémon, previously last seen 15 years ago in Colosseum and XD: Gale of Darkness. Likewise, 2020's Team GO Rocket Event brought Jessie and James.
  • August 2021 saw the surprise early launch of Gen VIII (outside of regional forms) in the game in the form of Zacian, Zamazenta, and the Skwovet, Wooloo, and Falinks lines, blindsiding the playerbase, who generally expected Gen VII to have some sort of presence in the game (again, outside of regional forms) before then.
  • The announcement that Gen IX mons would be added in September 2023 was perhaps even more surprising, not only because it was even sooner relative to their release than the Gen VIII mons, but because it meant that Gen IX would have its starters available before Gen VIII did, not to mention that there were still plenty of Gen VII mons (and even a few from Gen VI) that hadn't been released yet.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley:
  • Mr. Mime returns with the same disturbing "puppet-ish miming" animation and perpetual creepy smile it had in Pokémon X and Y; in fact, the combination of cartoonish, drawn-on details^note like its entire face, which is completely flat with realistic lighting and textures based off Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon's graphics arguably makes it even worse.
  • Unlike Giovanni, the appearances of Jessie and James are pretty much unchanged from their Pokémon: The Series counterparts - their relatively oversized heads and eyes look very out-of-place in a game that uses a more realistic art style.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Compared to the other two team leaders, Blanche has a more androgynous design, with little to indicate gender either way in official character art. This was settled when she was confirmed to be a woman via Word of God, though it seems character designer Yusuke Kozaki considers it open to interpretation, and as of late English materials have begun using they/them pronouns for the character more often, adding to ambiguous interpretations.
• Win Back the Crowd:
  • After experiencing a gigantic playerbase from early July - mid August of 2016, with a massive impact on pop culture at the time, the "Go Phenomenon" left as quickly as it came, likely due to the combination of Niantic mishandling certain well-liked previous features and the few changes in the game over this period. Whilst it still managed to hold a dedicated playerbase over the months, with the Halloween, Christmas, and Valentine's events triggering massive surges in activity, as well as the introduction of Ditto, this was not enough to make the game "popular" again, to the point that many articles even stated that the game was Condemned by History. When Niantic attempted this with the Gen 2 baby Pokémon added in December, it was met with indifference at worst, and anger at best, due to the majority simply being pre-evolutions to Kanto 'mons, and being notoriously hard to find. However, the release of the Gen 2 and 3 Pokémon (increasing variety of Pokémon in the game, as well as stopping many of the "genwunner" complaints), adding the well-received Pokémon Research system, and John Hanke promising the much-requested PVP in the future has once again made the game popular among the mainstream audience. When PVP was released, it saw a resurgence of former players returning, especially after it was revealed that PVP battles would be different to Gym and Raid battles.
  • Each new generation has saw a small but noticeable increase in players, many who favor that specific generation.
  • Trading, promised in the launch trailer, finally got added in June of 2018 and resulted mainly in existing players playing more frequently.

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