Pokemon GO Players Can Finally Finish Excellent Throw Challenges Thanks to April Fools Update

Around April Fools’ Day, Pokemon GO players expect to see something from Niantic to celebrate the day of jokes. This year, they were a bit early out of the gate with a March 31st announcement for an event where all Nice, Great, and Excellent throws would be considered Excellent.

Niantic announced via X that Professor Willow is currently investigating a strange new phenomenon where all throws are registering as Excellent:

Fans initially weren’t sure if this would turn out to be real, with early reactions from fans suggesting the Tweet was an April Fools’ joke that wouldn’t come to fruition as an in-game event. All that extra XP apparently seemed too good to be true.

But as of April 1, 2024, we can confirm that all Nice, Great, and Excellent throws are being credited as excellent. I personally also ran across a Team Rocket Grunt whose entire team was made up of Magikarp, but I haven’t seen anyone else mentioning it, so it may just be hilarious timing.

Along with this exciting opportunity to finish out Research requiring excellent throws, Pokemon GO also features a new An Excellent Opportunity Research path for April 1st, rewarding players with Poke Ball and Stardust for all of those Nice, Great, and Excellent Throws.

This limited-time research is for April 1 only, so you’ll need to catch all you can if you want to grab the rewards for April Fools and round out any outstanding research tasks with Excellent throws required. There are two tiers to the research, so with all throws coming up Excellent, it shouldn’t be too tough to tackle in a day as long as you’re able to get out and play for a little while.

Players will also be able to grab Field Research tasks today that lead to encounters with Spinda, which is a departure from typical April Fools-featured Pokemon like Ditto and Zorua. While some fans are a bit disappointed not to see these tricky Pokemon featured on this day for jokes and misdirection, many of us are pretty sick of seeing Shiny Pokemon turn in Zorua lately and welcome the break from that disappointment.

Reactions from the community are mixed now that we know the April Fools event is real. While some Pokemon GO trainers are excited about the opportunity to complete old research and earn a ton of XP for Excellent throws, others consider this a missed opportunity to give us new and interesting spawns on the map. I, for one, will never say no to a new set of research tasks to check off in the game, so as far as April Fools events go, this one isn’t half bad in my book.

Pokémon GO is available on iOS and Android.