The Road to Sinnoh was Paved with Mistakes

For the last four years, we’ve had a region-based event in February, with a large tour at the end of the month. The first year featured the Kanto Tour, which released every Pokemon in Generation 1 as a shiny, including shiny Mew in a special paid-for masterwork research. This continued for Johto and Hoenn, and we just had one for Sinnoh. Normally, leading up to the big tour, you get a “road to X” event, which is supposed to get you into the swing of things and bring back some Pokemon from the region as a teaser for the big event. However, this year, the Road to Sinnoh event as mostly sucked.

Mostly, it was the spawns that sucked. And the raids. And the research.

The spawns for the Road to Sinnoh were mostly just the Sinnoh starter Pokemon and a handful of other Sinnoh spawns, alongside normal seasonal spawns. Which meant we got the odd Bidoof or Patrat. But none of these spawns were interesting, and there was a lot of other stuff popping in. I saw probably too many Charmanders, Bulbasaurs and Chespins for my liking. At the same time, we didn’t see the Hisuian starters, which would have made more sense than all the Chespins I saw, since Hisui is just old Sinnoh. It was nice seeing a handful of evolved starters, but, again, that could have been more interesting.

The research in particular was horrible. 99% of it was hatch an egg or hatch 2 eggs for Pokeballs. Yeah, sure, there was half egg-hatching distance, but you can get 10 Pokeballs by spinning three Pokestops or opening two gifts. And hatching three eggs for a single Sinnoh Stone feels like an insult when previous Sinnoh-Stone-giving tasks only required you to spin Pokestops or catch Pokemon. And the research that WASN’T ‘hatch an egg’ was ‘spin 10 Pokestops for 10 candy’. What candy? Candy for the three Sinnoh starters. You know, the main spawns in this event. In the time it takes to spin 10 Pokestops, you could have caught two Turtwigs with a pinap.

I’d say that the raids were okay, especially since we FINALLY got Mega Absol back, but that was only for a couple of days. We got Mega Garchomp back for a day as well, as well as a few other Megas, but they had very little time in the spotlight. the 1-star and 3-star raids though were the worst, since they consisted of nothing but the Sinnoh starters and their first stage evolutions. All of which were already spawning in the wild. We also didn’t get any cool shadow raids to go alongside the Sinnoh tour, which is a bit of a missed opportunity.

I suppose at least you could get a handful of free Legendaries. Sure, you HAD to spend premium passes if you wanted Darkrai, but if you started the week with an orange raid pass, then it was possible to get Cresselia, Heatran and Giratina using only orange passes. Annoyingly though, ALL of the Legendary Pokemon available this week can ONLY get their special moves during their respective Raid Hours. While they did change Raid Hour to be two half-hour raids instead of one one-hour raid, that’s still annoying, especially since people will want to save their raid passes for Palkia and Dialga on the weekend. While Cresselia is skippable and Darkrai’s exclusive move sucks, Giratina is a pretty strong Pokemon, so one day of raiding for it and an hour for its exclusive move is a little rough. It’s also pretty weird that Giratina was restricted to a single day, despite being part of the Sinnoh legendary trio. I get it, Sinnoh has a lot of legendary Pokemon and they can’t all fit in one day, but Dialga and Palkia are getting their Origin Forms, having Giratina appear with his Origin Form would have fit thematically in the Sinnoh Tour itself. Should have had Altered Form Giratina in raids as well, as that has been missing for a long time.

Honestly, the whole week felt like it was making up for the fact that the Sinnoh tour this year is mostly free. Normally, you have the free ticket and the premium ticket, and the premium ticket has better shiny chances, a bunch of free raid passes and access to exclusive Pokemon. For the Sinnoh tour though, it’s all free and, instead, they want you to buy the extra tickets released during the Road to Sinnoh tour. The price kinda is about the same, for the same amount of stuff, but a lot of it is just extra timed research, and the Masterwork Research for shiny Shaymin is separate too. It also felt like they were trying to spread out a lot of the Sinnoh tour, simply because there are more Pokemon to deal with. Which is why we got the non-important Legendaries during the week, and Giratina was cut out of the Sinnoh tour itself.

But even then, the Road to Sinnoh felt half-assed. Like, sure, we’re getting Origin Forms for Dialga and Palkia, but we’re not getting the entire Sinnoh Pokedex like we did with previous tours. Arceus, Manaphy and Phione are all still missing. We could have had some interesting stuff on the Road to Sinnoh, but all we got were starter Pokemon that are going to be in the tour anyway, and the Legendaries no one wants.

It makes no sense. And it’s a missed opportunity. I kinda hope next year’s tour isn’t the same…