Posted in: Games, Mobile Games, Niantic, Pokémon GO | Tagged: Halloween event, Niantic, Niantic Labs, pokemon, pokemon go

Pokémon GO 2022 End-Of-Year List: Best & Worst Events of 2022

With 2022 wrapping up, let's take a look back at the best and worst Pokémon GO events of the year.

• BEST: Halloween 2022 Part II: Costumed Pokémon have become a staple of the annual Halloween event, and this year we had some good ones. New costumes include Spooky Festival Vulpix which could evolve into Spooky Festival Ninetails, Spooky Festival Gengar, and Spooky Festival Pumpkaboo which could evolve into Spooky Festival Gourgeist. Returning costumes were Halloween Mischief Pikachu, Halloween Mischief Drifblim, and Halloween Mischief Piplup. Vulpix, in particular, was a strong feature due to the iconic nature of this cute species from Kanto.
• WORST: Lush Jungle Event: Cottonee, the new Shiny of the event, was ludicrously rare outside of the weekend's Park Spotlight event-within-an-event, and even that didn't make up for this new Shiny's low spawn rate during the event. Niantic wanted to make Cottonee encounters more exciting by making them rare, but they ended up making this event about half as exciting as it could be. If a new Shiny is released, it should be among the most popular spawns in the game, as it's still hard to catch a Shiny within an event even if you play a lot. Cutting the spawn rate down to this just makes it so players don't want to go out and play.
• BEST: Fashion Week 2022: By far, the best aspect of Fashion Week events, from last year's second installment to this year's third, is how all previous Fashion Week costumes are featured even as new costumes are added. This feels like an annual re-try on missed Shinies from the previous year while also keeping things fresh for players who were already able to collect previous Shinies. I couldn't imagine anything bad to say about this event, which made the wild and raids exciting for a week. The only drawback is that Niantic delivers such a strong event and then shuts it down with perhaps the worst event of the year with Evolving Stars, grinding the spooky season excitement to a screeching halt.
• WORST: Valentine's Day 2022: This could've been a slam dunk, but making orange and white Flabébé are-they-even-in-the-game rare instead of rare enough to make the hunt rewarding was a horrendous choice.I have never played an event where I haven't been able to find and often even have a fair shot at hunting the "If you're lucky, you may find…" species until now. These felt prohibitively rare, which left us with nothing much to do in the game. No silhouettes to hunt. They were almost treated like Shinies, but I had a better chance of getting full odds of 1:500 Shinies than these two Flabébé. Of all the aspects of Pokémon GO events I've been reviewing for the past two years, this strikes me as one of the silliest choices I've seen Niantic make.
• BEST: Adventure Week 2022: Adventure Week sets the standard for events that follow through on proving how Pokémon GO can get its fanbase walking. I haven't felt such a drive to get out and walk for this game in a long time. Amaura, Tyrunt, Archen, and Tirtouga in Eggs made me excited to hatch everything I could in a day. I'd wait until midnight, open a full Egg slate of Gifts, incubate them all, walk until they were hatched, and do the same thing until I couldn't open any more gifts. This was by far the best reason Niantic has given us to actually do what they want and get out into the world and play. While I know this is meant to be an extra exciting event, if they can even match half of this content in other events, trust me. The Pokémon GO player base will be on the move. Amaura and Tyrunt are both exciting species that I was eager to see released, so that alone made this a winning event for me. The fact that this is just the beginning when many Season of Alola events barely offered a new species drop much less anything else, is indicative of how strong this event way. Archen and Tirtouga both got Shinies. Now, they didn't spawn in the wild and some didn't like that. However, these are rare species that many Trainers didn't have at all. Putting them in Eggs felt fair given their drop rate, and this is, after all, Adventure Week.
• WORST: Ultra Beast Arrival Global: Maaaaan, the marketing was good! It was fun to watch unfold but, when it comes down to it, the event itself was not fun. There was virtually nothing new added to the game. I love me some raids, yes, but all of the Ultra Beasts featured had already had their global arrival in raid rotations and previous events. We didn't even get a single Shiny release or a new Ultra Beast drop. You could have totally skipped the event and not missed out on any special features. The marketing sold the event so well that many Trainers assumed there had to be something secret being dropped during the event to make sense of the social media push for the event, but nope. Just a complete miss.
• BEST: Pokémon GO Tour Johto: While Pokémon GO Tour: Johto had a few flaws that Pokémon GO Tour: Kanto did not, this ticketed event was still fun to play, exciting to experience, and well worth the price of admission. Niantic had to get creative this year because the main feature for Pokémon GO Tour: Kanto was that Special Research unlocked Shiny Ditto for us for the first time ever which in turn unlocked a Masterwork Research with a guaranteed Shiny Mew. Niantic had to do some problem solving with Pokémon GO Tour: Johto, because the generation's Mythical, Celebi, had already been given its Shiny release through a promotion for the Secrets of the Jungle movie. This time around, the Special Research rather than Masterwork offered the Mythical encounter with Celebi suited with a special move while the Masterwork Research debuted Apex Shadow Pokémon with Ho-Oh and Lugia. This change works in my opinion as long as next year gets back to the Shiny Mythical release. Another fun aspect of the event was the Johto Beasts spawning in the wild. While most trainers will have their chance at these via raids, seeing Legendaries pop on your map is quite a rush for long-time players.
• WORST: Evolving Stars: There was nothing to do during Evolving Stars. There was no Shiny release, no new species drop outside of a one-time evolution, which we will cover in the next bullet, no new Mega to farm Enery for, no fun rewards from the Collection Challenges… nothing. The species in the wild were mostly uninteresting evolved forms. The Collection Challenges offered only evolution items that most players delete anyway. The wild and raids were barren outside of Xerneas. As a Day One player, I can't imagine a more boring event, and that's not even because it came after the incredible Fashion Week 2022. There was very simply nothing of consequence added to the game during this event. Worse, there was nothing even fun to do in the short term. Evolving Stars was an event that offered not even one single fun element and tasked players with an evolution that many didn't even want to complete with just one Cosmog. This could be the worst event that Niantic has ever hosted in Pokémon GO.
• BEST: Pokémon GO Fest: Finale 2022: Pokémon GO Fest 2022: Finale perfectly capped off a summer of fun events. The structure of a global remote event followed by special on-location events followed then again by a global remote finale is the perfect answer to the pandemic problem. This is how you continue the success of global GO Fest while also creating special, on-location, in-person events that players want to go to. Niantic should make this the new standard for summertime in Pokémon GO, because it was a terrific combination of the classic "get out and play" gameplay and the "bring the fun to you" vibes of the previous years' remote events.

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