Adventure Week Was Pretty Good
If I’m honest, most of this year’s events in Pokemon GO have been average at best. For some reason, Niantic saves all the good events for various times of the year. February generally has a tour event and some nice anniversary stuff. August contains GO Fest and a variety of enticing events. October has Halloween and December has Christmas. Events in other months are generally not as big and can be quite lame. However, this year’s Adventure Week (which are normally in July) has been a pretty good event.
Generally, Adventure Week (actually called Adventures Near and Far, but that’s a long name) has a bunch of fossil Pokemon that are featured in the update. Some are in eggs, some are tied to research, some are trapped in raids. However, this Adventure Week, all the fossil Pokemon (well, the ones already in the game), were available pretty much everywhere. They appeared in research, eggs, and, most importantly, they all appeared in the wild.
We also had some nice bonuses. Experience for spinning Pokestops giving x2 experience isn’t amazing, but the x5 bonus for spinning new Pokestops is interesting. Not that there are many. However, I’m always happy to see half walking distance for eggs, and I managed to clear out a couple of 10km eggs I’d been stuck with. And, speaking of eggs, 7km eggs only contained fossil Pokemon, rather than being full of normal trash. They were better than the 2km Riolu eggs, which had a ton of non-Riolu Pokemon inside them, and they didn’t take much longer to hatch because of the event bonuses.
The event also came with several collection challenges, and some timed research. This research was a little bit of a pain, as it had two different paths. The path I took was alright and mostly involved walking, but the other path required doing research tasks, which can be a pain if you don’t have many Pokestops. That being said, the event has been 7 days-ish long, so doing daily research tasks should be enough to get you to the end. The walking wasn’t too hard either, the most was 3km.
Even the research tasks were pretty good. There were a bunch of simple tasks, like catching 10 rock types or spinning 10 Pokestops, all of which rewarded the newest fossil Pokemon, Tyrunt and Amaura. However there were also some very time-consuming research tasks, like “catch 50 rock types” which instead gave other fossil Pokemon. I don’t know why these were there, because the other fossil Pokemon spawned plentifully. I ignored those and went for the Tyrunt/Amaura ones.
We also had a couple of Showcases, featuring Tyrunt and Amaura, again with the target being the biggest Pokemon. I didn’t really bother with these, the showcase Pokestops are rare for me, so I ended up just entering Pokemon I caught semi-nearby. The rewards aren’t as good anyway.
The only downside to this event is that I didn’t manage to get any shiny Fossil Pokemon. I did however get a shiny shadow Growlithe from a raid I did on a whim. Really, the raids could have been a bit better, maybe featuring more fossil Pokemon, but it meant I could save raid passes for the events in August. Because we’ve got GO Fest coming up soon…