The Hectic Kanto Event

The Kanto Tour has come and gone in Pokemon GO and it was… a thing. There were a ton of bonuses, a ton of raids and a LOT of Pokemon to catch. But was it worth the €12 ticket price? And did everything actually work?

Well, kinda.

So much to do, so little time.

We basically had lots of mini events running at the same time. Not only did we have a bunch of special raids, but we had special research and “today tab” research too. There was one mini-quest in the Today tab about battling NPCs, the shiny Ditto quest in the Special Research tab and the collect-a-thon. Even that though was split into multiple hours.

To be fair, there was no real hurry. But there were definitely Pokemon you NEEDED to catch before this event ends. The regional Pokemon were only available in raids, and if we didn’t get them now, we might be waiting months for them to come back. While the Legendary Birds are having a raid event, Mewtwo on the other hand might not reappear for a while.

Actually, now that I think about it, there was no hurry at all.

Because none of this is actually connected.

The whole collecting 151 Pokemon in one day thing? It’s not… a thing at all. This collect-a-thon was really just the same as the previous event collection thingies. The only difference was that there were more of them. And the Pokemon collection had nothing to do with either the NPC battles or the Ditto quest!

The NPCs are super annoying!

Another side-event of the Kanto Tour was random NPCs that you could fight. These worked identically to Team GO Rocket Grunts. Except they… kinda suck.

That’s a mean thing to say, since these NPCs are based on actual, real life players. There was a Twitter contest not too long ago asking players to post screenshots of their avatars. The winners were added as NPCs with themed teams. One winner has 3 Pikachus, another has the Charmander family, and so on. The most evil one is the Eevee NPC who has Jolteon, Flareon and Vaporeon, and they are all pretty tanky.

But the problem is that these NPCs seem to slow the game down. Not only do they get in the way like normal Grunts do, but they are EVERYWHERE. And, for some reason, they slow my phone down to a crawl. Something that definitely doesn’t happen with Grunts at all.

Shiny rates aren’t amazing.

The increased chances of shinies were… alright, I guess. Compared to GO Fest, there weren’t nearly as many shinies flying around. While, yes, pretty much everything in the game could be shiny, that didn’t mean anyone was guaranteed shinies. The only actually guaranteed shiny is Ditto, and that’s for ticket holders only.

What is interesting though is how random RNG can be. In the first 6 hours of the event, I actually didn’t get that many shinies and what I did get were mostly duplicates. But, somehow, in the second Fuchsia City hour, I got more shinies than I got all day, including TWO shiny Ponytas. The one Pokemon I genuinely wanted.

Somewhat ironically though, my brother complained about not getting shiny Vulpix when it first came out… then proceeded to get mostly nothing but shiny Vulpixes. His shiny luck has changed from amazing to shit, unfortunately.

You’re basically paying for shiny Mew, Ditto and a fuckton of items.

Granted, I did get 12 free raid passes out of this – a bunch of free ones (like raid days), 2 premium raid passes and 3 remote raid passes. There was also a sprinkling of rare candy, stardust and star pieces, lucky eggs and a single Incubator. Really though, what you are paying for is the research to get shiny Ditto, which leads into the long-ass research to get shiny Mew.

While the items do technically add up to over €12 worth of stuff, it doesn’t quite feel like it’s enough. Especially considering how much work there is to get Shiny Mew.

You know what was worth it though?

The music.

Seriously, the Kanto Tour featured some AMAZINGLY nice versions of the original Pokemon Red and Green soundtrack. I actually struggle listening to the original tracks (I ironically have a weakness to sound-based attacks). But these songs actually made me play Pokemon GO with sound on for once.

Just kinda wish the tracks were a bit longer.