Riolu Hatch Day – Unimpressive

On July 22nd, we had a new event. Called a Hatch Day, the idea is that a Pokemon with an increased shiny chance appears in 2km eggs, and all the eggs you can get are 2km eggs. Riolu Hatch Day was the first of this kind of event, and, well, it wasn’t great. During the middle of a heatwave in Europe and the middle of winter in the southern hemisphere, this was not the best time to be walking outside to hatch eggs. Luckily, I managed to find somewhere cool to walk, and spent most of the event in the nearby mall, where we at least had air conditioning.

You NEED incubators

Seriously, this event is unplayable unless you have a handful of incubators to speed things up. I managed to save enough coins to buy a Hatch Box in the shop, with 5 incubators in it. There was also one free super incubator for hatching an egg. But those just aren’t really enough if you actually want a chance at hatching a shiny. Or hatching anything at all, really.

More annoyingly, you needed incubators BEFORE the event too. Because, if you want to hatch a Riolu, you need to get rid of the eggs you already have to make space for the event 2km eggs. I managed to just about do this, but it was a bit of a waste on the incubators I had bought. The bonus egg space (for adventure sync eggs and 12km eggs) doesn’t fill up with 2km eggs at all, so you can at most only have 9 eggs.

At least you can theoretically just fill up on eggs and hatch them later. I don’t know how the shiny chances really work on eggs, so the ones I’ve not hatched yet might still have a good chance of being shiny. There’s no real way of knowing.

Quirky, I guess.

The egg hatching event was quite quirky. Every egg I got was a 2km egg, which I hatched as soon as possible. But the eggs weren’t guaranteed to be 2km eggs or even hatch Riolu. There was a tiny chance of getting 5km and 10km eggs. What’s more weird though is that the eggs didn’t guarantee a Riolu. There were other Pokemon inside the eggs too, just with a very small chance of hatching them.

My shiny luck wasn’t very good, I got one shiny out of 25 eggs, but I did get a nice 96% Riolu. Annoyingly though, I got very little XL candy and not much candy overall. Only about 150 candy, which means I’ll probably have to walk a Riolu if I want to power some up. It’s also good to give Riolu a second move before you evolve it, since it gets a discount. Still, that’s 10k stardust and 25 candies, so it’s still not super cheap, but oh well.

What also surprised me was that there was no half or quarter egg hatching distance. They kept hatch distances normal, despite having 1/4 egg hatching distance during the Squirtle make-up event the next day.

It was really boring

The second biggest issue is that this event is really boring. The spawns from the current event consist of about 4 Pokemon, meaning you have little to do while you walk to hatch your eggs. Okay, sure, there are other things you can do, like talking to people and things like that. But with such boring Pokemon spawns, you might as well just ignore the game completely and only check in when eggs hatch. It’s doubly boring if you’re playing indoors or in your car since spawns don’t refresh very quickly.

Overall, it was an okay event. But it was no fun in the sun, and it really needed to have more candy and more incubators. Without incubators and a clear inventory, this event would have completely sucked.