Posted in: Games, Mobile Games, Pokémon GO | Tagged: pokemon, pokemon go, season of legends

Season Of Legends: Complete Pokémon GO Season Review

The Season of Legends is wrapping up tomorrow in Pokémon GO. This is the game's second-ever season, following December 2020's Season of Celebration. How did this season measure up and set the bar for future endeavors? Let's get into it.

What worked in this Pokémon GO season

• Overall improvement: The Season of Celebration was hit or miss in many ways. It ended with the excellent Pokémon GO Tour: Kanto, but the build-up was incredibly lackluster. The Season of Legends had similar problems, which we'll get to, but overall it was a better offering. A major change we saw was a more consistent introduction of new content. We had new species added, a Community Day with a new Shiny, a starter Community Day, new Legendaries, and new Shiny Legendaries. That, overall, puts the Season of Legends above the Celebration.
• Spawn diversity: The spawn diversity was up from last Season as well. I think that Niantic still has kinks to work out to improve the number of species we see outside of events, but last season felt static while this kept interest going for its full three-month run.
• Wild surprises: What kept the wild spawns fun during this season was the possibility of rare encounters. We had Gible spawning more often especially during the first half of the season, and we even saw the Shiny release of Arcanine in the wild. It's the first time in a long time (I believe since Clefairy, which was previously only obtainable by hatching Shiny Cleffa) that we've seen the release of a non-Mega-capable Shiny evolved spawn.
• May 2021: This month kicked the Season of Legends into high gear, especially with raids. The introduction of Xerneas and Yveltal, events with Fairy-types and Dragon-types, the announcement of Gible Community Day, and the release of a wave of Kalos Pokémon made this worth some of the more boring build-up.

What didn't work in this Pokémon GO season

• Raid structure: March and April were rough for raiders. These two months saw the release of the Therian Formes of Thundurus, Landorus, and Tornadus and the Shiny release of the same Pokémon's Incarnate Formes. This sounds great on paper, but what it ended up doing was clogging the raid rotation for two entire months with essentially the same species. The problem was that the rotations lasted too long and Niantic made the weird move to bring the Incarnates back for a lack-of-victory lap after the Therians in April after featuring them all month long in March. So weird.
• Inconsistent events: As mentioned above, the events leading up to May's two Luminous Legends events were hit or miss. There were a few good ones and a few lackluster ones, but at least we saw less of Niantic gating new Shinies behind raids.
• Communication: A consistent problem with Niantic remains communication. The use of Twitter to convey information that can easily be made into a blog or in-app pop-up is bizarre and the speed at which the company replies to inquiries about missing content and glitches hasn't improved in a very long time.

Overall

Pokémon GO feels like it has been in a state of transition for a long time now, but if the end of the Season of Legends is indicative of where things are going, it looks like we're in for some great fun.

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