here are now more Pokémon to collect in Pokémon Go than in any of the franchise’s main series games.
Today’s new Pokémon Go in-game event adds a menagerie of creatures from the franchise’s fictional Paldea region, featured in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, bringing the total number of species available in Pokémon Go up to a whopping 814.
That’s more than the record number of Pokémon available to use in any main series game, with the most being 809 in Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon.
Its a collectors game with nothing good to collect. This might seem like a silly take, and with 813 pokemon now in the game, it should be. But the way pokemon are laid out in this game is just horrendous.
In the main series games, you LOOK for pokemon. You might just wander around the grass for a while and take what you get, but at some point, you have a shopping list. In order to find specific pokemon, you go to a specific location. You find the pokemon you are looking for, often with others similar in type.
Well, in pokemon go, this isn’t the case at all. There are maybe 20-40 pokemon in the spawn pool at any given time. Go somewhere, ANYWHERE around you, and you are going to see more of the same. Once you have them, you wait for the next spawn rotation (sometimes thats 1 month, sometimes its 8) or events. The events are somewhere between 3 hours and 1 week long, and then you might actually have some cool shit, and the game is exciting for a bit. But after that, its back to the same old bullshit.
Now the game is just about collecting shinies. This is really what niantic has tried to monetize. The (often only) way to get them is to either hatch eggs (buying incubators) or doing raids (buying raid passes). The other way to get them is by doing certain events where they hand them out like candy. I stopped a couple years ago when i had well over 300 shinies, because there just wasn’t a point anymore. The whole “cool collectible” factor came from them being rare, if everyone gets them in events, why is it special?
Well, no. Rates are higher at different times of day, near bodies of water, in different weather, closer to high-foot-traffic zones, in forests, from eggs and from raids.
Not to mention continents.
300 different pokemon shiny or 300 shinies including dupes? While getting a shiny during an event is easy actually being committed and grind out every shiny event is crazy dedication. I can’t bother with the game because the core gameplay loop is just so incredibly boring, and as you say is nothing like Pokemon should be. I’m slowly transferring everything to Pokemon Home and in that regard it has been pretty nice in terms of getting legendaries and mythicals that are really tough in the main series games to get. I’ve never catched the original 151 before and when I combine Let’s Go Pikachu with Pokemon Go into Pokemon Home I’ll actually tick that childhood goal off, which feels nice.
Definitely including dupes, I got rid of tons of dupes from events but the spawn pool was so limited you were bound go get more. I was dedicated enough to grind out wild shinies, but if it was locked behind incubators or raids, forget about it.