The Pokémon global missions, new special events in the Sun and Moon entries, ask trainers across the world to work together as a team to accomplish a goal within two weeks. So far, trainers haven’t successfully completed either of the first two global missions.
The first global mission kicked off on November 29, shortly after the games were released. The goal was for 100 million Pokémon to be caught worldwide by December 13. By the time the mission started, the titles had already become the fastest-selling games in the Americas, reaching a staggering 3.7 million combined sales in their first week and half on shelves — but that target number was still way out of reach. By December 13, the counter had only reached 16.4 million, although the number would’ have likely been much higher had Nintendo not required trainers to sync their collections on Global Link with a special ID.
For the second global mission, players had to use the “Island Scan” to find and battle specific Pokémon. Game Freak set a seemingly modest goal of 1 million that time around, but when the mission ended on January 9, trainers had only reached 661,839, or roughly two-thirds of the set amount. Again, the requirement necessitated the global sync function in order for progress to be included in the target number, so it’s a safe bet that at least some players either didn’t know about the mission or forgot to sync their battles. Game Freak doled out 217 festival coins to each participant for the effort, but if the goal had been reached, that number would have been 2,017 coins.
The third Pokémon global mission will run from January 31 to February 14.
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