Following on from the success of last year’s Kanto Day event, this year’s Pokémon Tour came to a close on Saturday night. This event — the second of what seems to be annual tours to one of the franchise’s many regions — this one saw us visit Johto, the world of Pokémon Gold and Silver.
What was Pokémon Go Tour: Johto?
Much like last year’s Pokémon Go Tour: Kanto – or ‘Kanto Day’ as everyone called it – Johto Day was a semi-paywalled event focussed on the titular region. Much like last year, it was split into three streams: Silver (focused on Lugia), Gold (focused on Ho-Oh) and free.
For the sake of £10, or (or equivalent in local currency), players gained access to a string of research quests and challenges, some of which needed to be completed on the day, with the rest to do at your leisure.
The challenges saw you attempt to catch (or evolve) every Pokémon first discovered in the Johto region, with some notable additions from the main-series game, such as the shiny red Gyarados. Certain in-game mechanics were relaxed to make this a little easier, like moving baby Pokémon into 2km eggs and ramping up incubator effectiveness, and removing some of the hurdles to evolving Eevee into Espeon and Umbreon.
Most importantly, for many players, this was the first chance to encounter the region-locked Pokémon Corsola, allowing them to finally finish their Johto region Pokédex.
The last major pull to the event was that all Johto Pokémon are now available in game as shinies. This, however, was something of an issue and we will certainly be returning to it later.
How was this different to Kanto Day?
The obvious answer here is that it focussed on a different region, which means different Pokémon. Notably, there are fewer Pokémon for Johto, with 100 to the traditional 150 that fans of Red and Blue might naturally expect.
Johto added new evolutions from Kanto Pokémon, like the two Eeveelutions previously mentioned, along with new evolution mechanics, such as using the metal coat to evolve Onix to Steelix or Scyther to Scizor. This means that a whole bunch of Kanto mons were spawning on Johto Day, and the day was immediately less exciting when the first thing you saw was a bunch of wild Poliwhirls – its evolution was an essential part of the Johto Dex, so we’re not going to complain too much.
However, the second thing you noticed, clicking into the event to see what’s up, was pure information overload. With 10 challenges (five hourly catch challenges, a version-exclusive catch and trade challenge each, a raid challenge, an evolution challenge and a ‘special’ challenge) and the Masterwork challenge (the one intended to be completed at your leisure), there was a lot to do here.
This was compounded by the return of wild trainer battles, with each focusing on a different type (normal, flying, dragon etc). That, in turn, was complicated by the focus on Team Go Rocket, who fought trainers for spawn locations.
What does this all mean in practice? Completing the Pokédex meant playing the game for at least five hours straight to complete all catch and evolution challenges, and do all of the trainer and Rocket encounters — because all of them counted towards this. You also had to complete the ‘at your leisure’ challenge on the day to catch Celebi, which obviously counted too. The real ‘at your leisure’ challenge came after catching Celebi, allowing you to work your way towards the new Apex Shadow Lugia/Ho-Oh; something many thought were available on the day, but were sorely mistaken.
All in all, there was too much offered and it was too poorly communicated in advance of the event. While Niantic has been better at communication after last year’s soft boycott from the community, they kind of dropped the ball here.
There was one last addition that is worth mentioning, however — the wild spawning of the three legendary dogs (the equivalent to Articuno et al from Kanto). While this was exciting to see, they effectively had a 0% catch rate; the only way to catch them was to take a photo for a guaranteed spawn with normal catch rates as part of a reward for one of the challenges. At best this was just a bad idea that was poorly executed. If you had actually been able to catch them in the wild, the day would have been vastly improved.
Was Johto Day worth the money?
No, it was not. For my money, Kanto Day was worthwile, but I genuinely feel ripped off this time around.
As previously mentioned, the shinies were a bit of an issue. As one of the main marketing pulls to this event, which shinies you could encounter at increased rates was decided by which version you chose — Gold or Silver.
I played all 12 hours of the event (9am to 9pm) on my main account and caught four wild shinies, not including the scripted red Gyarados. My second account walked away with 10, so we’ll call that an average of 7 shinies and less than one per hour. There’s always going to be variation in a game heavily based on RNG, but talking to friends, my local community and looking to Reddit, I was not an outlier. One unlucky trainer I know walked away with just two shinies at the end of the day.
Now, some attempt has been made to point out online that with the day so split between raids and battles, you’ll naturally catch fewer shinies than a Community Day, but this doesn’t hold water for me. Community days cost 79p for a premium event, and with this so many times more expensive, it needs to be a whole lot better.
Secondly, I tend to walk away from half a Community Day (3 hours or so) with a reliable 15+ shinies. I’d expect an average 30ish shinies at the same rate of play, if the shiny rates were kept as high as community day. I caught more shiny Hoppips on Community Day than I caught in total on Johto Day.
So, what does Niantic need to do better?
Niantic seemed to listen to last year’s feedback: the server issues and bugs of last year were mostly absent. Sure, I still had issues with both, but none were so major that they’re worth focussing on. With that in mind, let’s hope they’re reading and are welcome to the following two bits of constructive feedback.
Firstly, communication: don’t advertise shinies as a bonus and then not follow through. Don’t advertise the Apex Shadow legendaries as reasons to play, and then fail to communicate that you can’t actually catch them on the day. We’ve been hammering away at Niantic for years about this communication issue and while they have certainly improved, there is still more they can do.
Second, Niantic needs to scale back the day to what makes it fun and do better at the information overload in-game. Sure, put in trainer battles if you must, but don’t lock progression behind them and then not make it obvious that you need to beat them to finish your Dex. This made the day more tiring than fun, which isn’t what you’re going for if you’re a parent looking to play a game with your kids, as a good chunk of the player base is.
In all, Johto Day, wasn’t awful, but nor was it a solid pass and nor should that be the bar that Niantic is striving for. If they work to fix these issues and do their best to make next year’s Hoenn Day the best it can be, they have the potential to build something genuinely special; not just something people will only play so they can finally catch Kecleon.
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