Litten Community Day
I’m gonna be blunt, I don’t like Incineroar. I think it looks smug and stupid and it was CLEARLY designed to be yet another fire/fighting type starter until Gamefreak realized they couldn’t add a fourth fire/fighting starter after Combusken, Infernape and Emboar. In the main games, it’s overly popular and a pain in the ass, and its shiny kinda doesn’t look as good as that of its pre-evolutions. Either way, Litten finally got its shiny release and Community Day in Pokemon GO. It was fine. And it was nice to see the x3 catch XP come back. Getting 7000 XP on an excellent throw with a lucky egg was nice. The double stardust from the Weather Week event running concurrent with the Community Day also stuck around, but I DID notice that Pokeballs from gifts were reduced for the duration of the Community Day. Before the event, I got multiple x5 Pokeballs from people I was trying to get Lucky Friends with, but opening gifts DURING the Community Day consistently only gave me bundles of 3 Pokeballs. Which is bullshit.
As for how good Incineroar is? Again, it’s fine. Blast Burn is a massive improvement on all of Incineroar’s fire moves, and it’s about as good as normal Charizard and Combusken. Incineroar at least has Fire Fang, which does decent damage, but when it comes to fire types, there are generally better options, mostly in the form of Reshiram. Things are made worse by the fact that Charizard and Combusken both have shadow forms, which boosts their damage majorly, but when shadow Incineroar does come out (it probably will) its slightly bulkier stats will make it a good pick.
Luckily though, Incineroar also gets Darkest Lariat added to its normal charge move pool. For a dark type, again, it’s alright, and if you had Sunny Weather during the Community Day and caught some high CP Littens, evolving them and giving them Darkest Lariat means you can nab a quick budget dark type to use against Shadow Mewtwo when it appears at the end of the month. That being said, at the same time, Tyranitar is a better pick, and that is currently in Mega Raids as of writing. If you go a little further back, Deino was around back in December and is also an excellent dark type. But in all honesty, Houndoom is almost as good a choice as Incineroar is, it also has a shadow AND a Mega available and costs less to evolve, and Zoroark is somehow better than Incineroar, even if it’s flimsier. I mean, Incineroar is definitely not a bad choice if you’re new and lack dark types, but Tyranitar should be a larger focus of yours.
When it comes to the Community Day, it was nothing special. However, for me, it was a massive pain in the ass. The first problem being that I couldn’t access the area I normally play, because of a local carnival. The roads were completely blocked and there were too many people around, so I ended up playing in a smaller area. I did consider driving down to either the harbour or where I used to live (which I turned into a small Pokemon GO paradise, adding a HUGE amount of Pokestops there) but since I kinda already live in the middle of town where the carnival was, getting past that would have been a huge waste of my time.
At the same time, I kinda just ran into loads of problems. But not at first. I started off playing on my old little account, mostly so I could work towards finishing some special research. Litvir (named after a brief and originally one-off Phoviverse character who somehow turned into a protagonist) has got multiple Super Rocket Radars that I am working towards, and I hope to use most of them when Shadow Groudon comes out, in the hopes I get a good one. I also just wanted to catch a few Littens, get a shiny and get the Pokedex entry, and the very first Litten I caught was a shiny. I spent about 30 minutes playing on this account, caught two shinies, evolved three Incineroars, completed some special research, did a route then switched to my main account. Everything was fine. When I switched to my main account though, it was like someone had set the game to hard mode. The game would constantly freeze and crash, trying to exchange a gift with Mateo and do a route, two things I literally just did on the Litvir account, kept on bugging out, Pokemon would constantly jump and attack and break out of Pokeballs and so many Littens fled. It took me an hour to get a shiny Litten on my main account, compared to about 5 seconds for Litvir.
And when I switched back to the other account at the end of the event to grab some extra research? Game was fine. Completely normal. I was back to catching Littens that stood still, with normal Pokeballs, rather than having to use Ultra Balls on everything.
I suppose at least I got two cool things today. Firstly, I managed to get Best Buddies with my 96% shiny Garchomp. But more importantly, I managed to reach level 3 Primal Level on my 100% Groudon, Wonderblades. I actually Primal Reversioned (that makes no sense in the past tense) my Groudon to get bonus XL candy on Litten, since Primal Groudon is a Ground/Fire type, but I honestly didn’t get nearly as many XL candies as I wanted. I started at about 10 XL candy but only ended up with about 160, and that was after deleting all my trash Pokemon. Okay, sure, I wasn’t catching every single Litten I saw, but I expected more from an “Excellent Candy XL Chance” as described on the Primal Level screen.
Ugh. This was a mostly frustrating day for me. Would not recommend.