The Johto Event Has Been the Best of These Region-based Pokemon GO Events

The last few weeks, we’ve been having run-up events in Pokemon GO. There’s going to be a massive Kanto event in February, and before then, we’ve been celebrating the other regions. These events though have been very hit and miss. Thankfully, the Johto event has probably been the kindest of them all.

These events have all been very similar, You have a bunch of Pokemon you need to collect, as well as a new shiny and featured raids and spawns. But these events have not been particularly equal.

The Sinnoh and Unova Events were mediocre at best.

We’ve been going backwards through the years, staring off with Unova. Unova had pretty much nothing in it. No special legendaries or anything. All it did was spawn a tiny handful of Unova Pokemon, and mostly just the starters. There were a handful of other spawns, but the crappy “season of celebration” spawns took up too much real estate, especially in partly cloudy and cloudy weather. I’d say that the spawns

What made matters worse was the new shiny. While Snivy is one of my favourite starters, it being shiny and not getting a community day is yet another kick in the balls. I lucked out and caught a shiny Snivy, but I caught over 400 Snivies total during the event and grinded a little too hard for it. And the other starters, Oshawott and Tepig, were completely ignored and worthless in comparison.

Sinnoh wasn’t that much better. We got shiny Buizel, but most of the spawns were the same. Half Season of Celebration crap, half Sinnoh starters, with the occasional Buizel thrown in.

The only thing saving the Hoenn event was Meteor Mash Metagross and the Legendaries

If you evolved a Metagross during the Hoenn week, you could get the community day move Meteor Mash. A move that has been inaccessible for the last year or so. We also had something interesting in raids for a change: Kyogre and Groudon, who haven’t really been seen since GOFest 2020. They tied in with a mini research which required catching 2 of each, so you could get a Rayquaza with Hurricane.

These two things basically carried the whole event. And, honestly, Hurricane on Rayquaza as a special move is pretty shit – Moltres works better as a flying type attacker and Rayquaza is better as a dragon type. It also means we’re going to end up with a different exclusive move on Rayquaza in the future.

Still, there were only a few Pokemon spawning. The only ‘new’ (i.e. not new at all) shiny was Aron, which was more uncommon than it normally is in partly cloudy weather. It was nice seeing about one Beldum a day, but that wasn’t enough to get a whole Metagross. And the Pokemon required for the collection tasks, Bagon, was nonexistent outside of raids. And Bagon raids were also EXCEPTIONALLY rare. I saw a grand total of 2, despite being able to see 9 gyms pretty much all the time.

Johto has a perfectly doable collection task and a special legendary.

Johto’s collection task was nice and not too complicated. No running around on pure RNG for Team Rocket grunts, and no need to do Raids or wait for a brief event at the very end. Miltank and Sudowoodo are uncommon but definitely present, and nothing is locked away behind research tasks. The event legendaries, Raikou, Entei and Suicune, have been split over various days rather than all coming at once. And there’s a research task to get a Ho-Oh, requiring you to do Team Rocket battles.

Would have been nice to have more Team Rocket Balloons, but you can’t have everything.

We also got Smack Down Tyranitar again, who is even rarer than Meteor Mash Metagross because that community day was so long ago. Larvitar is also much, much more common, and you get a guaranteed one for doing the Ho-Oh research.

More importantly though, the eggs and the spawns are better. This event’s 5km eggs contain lots of nice baby Pokemon with shinies. The spawns are much more varied and just seem to contain more Pokemon overall. It’s not all just starters, we have a few more Pokemon, not just the ones needed for the collect-a-thon but just overall. I’ve seen Yanma, Gligar and the whole Hopip family. On top of that, these Pokemon are also outnumbering the Season of Celebration Pokemon.

Or maybe I’ve just been lucky with my spawns.

Still, all these lead-up events make me kinda nervous for the Kanto Tour.

Sure, there’s gonna be a lot of cool stuff, but part of me is worried that the Kanto Tour will be more like Unova or Sinnoh and less like Johto and Hoenn… I guess we’ll just have to see…