Trainers,
today we took a second look on the decoded 0.57.2 GAME_MASTER and we have some news to report. We would not call these news “bad” per se, but this will hurt some of Smeargle fans out there.
P.S. The cover image of this article is not a Pokémon GO model, it’s a model from Pokémon X&Y. Includes normal and Shiny Smeargle variant.
The GAME_MASTER shows that Smeargle’s moves are not yet implemented and thus Smeargle is not yet available. This could be the Ditto of Generation II.
Smeargle’s GAME_MASTER entry shows the same placeholder moves like Ditto had for months:
quick_moves: TACKLE_FAST cinematic_moves: STRUGGLE
To further support this we went in to find anything related to Smeargle’s signature Sketch move. Unfortunately, we didn’t found anything: no animations, no placeholders, nothing.
Further investigation and future Smeargle event hints
We’ll be frank: this came as a bit of surprise to us. Sure, Smeargle is a potentially game breaking Pokémon in Generation II, but we expected at least some backing code.
We tried searching through the metadata using keywords like:
Doble Sketch Smeargle
As mentioned earlier, we had no luck. In the original series, Smeargle can learn the following moves:
We expect Smeargle to follow the same pattern as Ditto, appearing as a discovery by the Professor. In the anime, Smeargle is know for vandalizing the town of Whitestone using three colors: red, blue and yellow. You can watch the episode named “The Art of Pokémon” on Youtube.
We expect Smeargle to appear in Pokémon GO in a future event. We speculate that Smeargle could be responsible for various Gyms changing team colors, similar to what happens in Ingress during similar events.
