My wife and I are kind of late to the party on this. We depend on a friend of ours to keep us up to date on Pokemon Go, but she wasn’t up on this one… or was holding out on us maybe.
While my wife and I play Pokemon Go regularly, I don’t follow the news of it as closely as I do, say, EVE Online. So my first hint that something was going on was when I noticed people on my friend’s list were saving a lot of my daily gifts as postcards, a little used feature of the game up until this point… so far as I can tell anyway.
I ignored this for a bit, thinking it odd but whatever… however, when in persisted for a couple of weeks I went out to look it up and found out we had completely blown by the Vivillon launch back in December and Niantic’s plan for it.
Vivillon, which also happens to occupy position #666 in the national pokedex, is a seventh generation Pokemon that came in with Pokemon Sun & Moon and is one of those
“gotta catch em all” specials that doesn’t just have a couple of evolutions, but also comes in 20 different color variations. I forget how they worked that in Sun & Moon, but I am sure the online trading post was hot with exchanges across the world to get the versions people were missing.
Pokemon Go is more “real time” than the core RPG series, lacking a Pokemon auction house of sorts. So the plan was to make the various Vivillon versions available via gift exchanges.
When you get a gift from a friend you save it as a postcard… hence the behavior I noticed… and when you collect enough you get a Scatterbug that appears. That is the larval state of the Vivillon and you need 125 candies to get it into its full splendor.
The trick is that the location of the postcard dictates which color variation of the Vivillon you end up with if you evolve that particular Scatterbug. They even have a map that shows you where in the world you need to have friends send you gifts if you want that particular flavor of Vivillon.
Where to find Vivillon… sort of… also, no China, no Russia
You should probably click on that to see if full size.
The 18 variations of Vivillon that are currently available… they are holding two in reserve I guess… are the following locales:
- Archipelago
- Continental
- Elegant
- Garden
- High Plains
- Icy Snow
- Jungle
- Marine
- Meadow
- Modern
- Monsoon
- Ocean
- Polar
- River
- Sandstorm
- Savanna
- Sun
- Tundra
So now you don’t just need Pokemon Go friends around the world to help level you up or get regional raid targets, you also need them for Vivillon.
There is probably a Discord server somewhere that broker’s friendships to fill that obsessive need to collect them all. I just haven’t looked yet.
Instead, I am making friends the old fashioned way… by hooking up with random strangers on the internet. Or on Twitter, in my case. But the internet has paid off so far and I have managed to get at least the base level Scatterbug for 11 of the 18 Vivillon variations.
My success so far
But that leaves me with 7 more to collect.. leaving aside the couple thousand Vivillon candy I’ll need to evolve the whole lot… for which I need to get at least one Scatterbug.
I am currently missing:
- Garden
- Icy Snow
- Meadow
- Ocean
- River
- Sandstorm
- Sun
You’d think, being in California, I would have Sun covered… but we’re a High Plains area. So I have to work on finding some friends in those areas. (My trainer code is 3216 2939 2424 if you happen to be in one of those places… or if you need some High Plains gifts.)
And, of course, I need more gifts to feed the maw of this mild Pokemon Go obsession.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 