Posted in: Games, Mobile Games, Niantic, Pokémon GO | Tagged: lapras, Niantic, pokemon, pokemon go, Water Festival 2022

Pokémon GO Event Review: Annual Water Festival 2022

For the past week, Pokémon GO players have been experiencing a flood of Water-type Pokémon in the wild as part of the annual Water Festival event. Was this event worth playing or did it end up drier than expected?

What worked in this Pokémon GO event

• Bow Lapras: Long, long ago, dataminers discovered Lapras wearing a bow in the game's code. Many events came and passed but now, we finally got Lapras. Some trainers were mad that it wasn't in the wild, but I found Tier Three raids the proper move here. Lapras made Tier Three exciting once again, which usually only happens when a new Shiny is released as a raid exclusive like Druddigon or Galarian Weezing.
• New species: The Alola rollout continued with Dewpider and its evolution Araquanid, which added some much-needed spice to the wild. While I did say I'm not mad that Lapras wasn't in the wild, I do have gripes about the event's wild spawns. We'll get to that.
• Classic event structure: Finally, I liked that this felt like a classic event with a wide focus that brought some new content to the game. An event with a new species drop, a new Costumed Pokémon, and a new Shiny release is my ideal. There was a problem with the Shiny release, though.

What didn't in this Pokémon GO event

• Prohibitive rarity: Binacle was the event's new Shiny. In the past, a newly unlocked Shiny-capable Pokémon was one of the most common spawns of an event. Trainers of all paces were able to grind to hunt the new Shiny. Now, it seems as if these new Shiny-capable species are rarer inside of the event than out. For example, I see a good amount of Cottonee now, in contrast to its extreme rarity during it release event. Now, with Binacle, I was lucky if I saw one per day, and I play relatively hard. On the first day of the event, I saw three of the uber-rare Hitmon top in between the two Binacle I saw that day. It was only a rainy day that brought forth a few more Binacle spawns. Other than that? It was as if it wasn't in the game.

Overall

Of all of Niantic's current trends, making the Pokémon people want to Shiny hunt in an event prohibitively rare is by far the worst. I'm over the Incense changes, I'm personally over all discussion of the Poké Stop radius, but this change to events is one I hope isn't permanent, as it takes half the excitement away. The Water Festival 2022 was saved by Bow Lapras and Dewpider, but the rarity of Binacle was baffling and it's part of a bad trend that Niantic should nip in the bud.

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