How To Find Pokémon GO’s New Team Rocket Leaders And Special Research Boss Giovanni

Pokemon GO

Niantic

Pokémon GO is not done yet integrating Team Rocket into the game. For a while now, we’ve been fighting Team Rocket Grunts and their Shadow Pokémon, but now the game is moving into new territory. Pokémon GO players have their team leaders, Blanche, Candela and Spark, but now we’re meeting Team Rocket Leaders as well, along with their big boss, a well-known handheld series character.

Pokémon GO has been teasing the new Team Rocket Leaders all week long, which include Cliff, rival to Blanche, Sierra, rival to Spark, and Arlo, rival to Candela. There’s actually a good amount of “lore” Niantic has written about these there which you can read here if you like.

But now it’s time to crush them.

Niantic has outlined the steps you need to undertake in order to find the Team Rocket leaders, defeat them, and then ultimately do a special research project that will lead you to a fight with the Big Boss, Giovanni, grand leader of Team Rocket.

Step 1: You have a new Special Research task (live this morning) called Looming in the Shadows, so head there first.

Step 2: You need to find “Mysterious Components” which will drop from Team Rocket Grunts that you fight in the wild, so do battle with as many as you can.

Step 3: Six Mysterious Components will allow you to create a Rocket Radar, which allows you to find the hideouts of Team Rocket leaders near you.

Pokemon GO

Niantic

Step 4: You have to fight Cliff, Sierra and Arlo. They have Shadow Pokémon (including some we’ve never seen before) and you have to beat them and rescue their Pokémon which may have special properties, according to Niantic. As an aside, you need a Rocket Radar to find hideouts, but if someone you know has a Radar, you can leech onto them and use it to find the location of a hideout without one of your own, allowing friend groups to do this together even if they’re not quite on the same step.

Step 5: With a bunch of Grunt and Leader battles under your belt, along with a few other tasks, you will eventually get a Super Rocket Radar from Willow which will allow you to find Giovanni. Niantic warns that other Grunts may pose as fake Giovannis before you actually find him. The reward for defeating the man himself? A Legendary Shadow Pokémon. Whoa. Big Moves.

So yeah, that’s the long and short of it. It’s going to take a lot of mowing through Team Rocket to get this done, but man, this really is a game transformed. If you would have told me even a year ago we’d be fighting through Team Rocket NPCs to fight Giovanni I would not have believed you, but GO really has come a long way.

This is a very cool endeavor and “storyline” that GO has come up with, and I can’t wait to get started. Let’s go destroy some Rocket goons.

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