This weekend was Pokémon GO Fest 2024: Global, and what a weekend it was! With new shinies to hunt, raids to defeat, and challenges aplenty, here is my review of the weekend.
Day One
First up, as is our tradition for our group, we meet up for breakfast to start the day right. We discussed potential trades, what we wanted to achieve from the day, and planned out our day.
So our first big problem was very obvious from the moment we woke up. Torrential rain! I hunted out extra umbrellas and my rain coat, but it was really grim outside. Where we play is a sea front, so the wind and rain were very much not ideal. We tried to play on foot but within minutes our phones were so wet with rain that it was literally impossible to play Pokémon GO. Sadly that meant we had no choice but to hop into a car to play, as there are no indoor areas we can play in locally. The rain didn’t ease the entire day, it was such a shame! The UK has been having unseasonably wet weather with summer nowhere in sight, and this is the first time it has really badly impacted our GO Fest plans. We also don’t have a ‘hop on hop off’ type bus we could utilise like the cities do.
We decided raiding the Ultra Beasts and checking out the huge cluster spawns would be our best bet, as Necrozma would feature in Day Two. We didn’t have a huge amount of luck with the shiny Ultra Beasts, but it was very cool to see them on the beach biome backdrop! The Beast Balls were so handy, making it much quicker to catch raid bosses, meaning less time wasted and more time to shiny check.
We all had the Party Play! Research to complete still, so decided we would try to hammer through that as best we could across the weekend. The challenges were quick and easy to complete, and being able to encounter the costume Pikachu as rewards was fantastic, with the shinies seeming to be fairly common too! Parties lasting the full 8 hours was also a bonus, but I do wish that the animation was quicker as it often meant you missed an Incense spawn.
One thing we all liked was that the Collection Challenges didn’t appear until the hour the spawns were featured in which meant the page felt less clustered and not as overwhelming as the today page often can be.
A stop for lunch and a recharge was much needed, and gave time to check through our catches and see what we needed to focus on. We opted to stop during the replay of the first hour at 2pm as it had less shinies that any of us needed.
In terms of gameplay, our only issues were some lag once we hit 1pm, and we had some weird raid lobbies glitches. One raid my friend James appeared in 5 times, and for some reason we couldn’t always all see the private raid lobby option which we were occasionally using due to what seemed to be spoofers not using the ready up button. (The accounts were very low level, and clearly only created that day due to the amount of Pokémon they had caught!)
We had a fantastic day, with a lot of laughter and fun, GO Fest is so much more when you are with your pals!
I ended my day on 50 shinies and the threat of being thrown in the sea for getting too many shinies!
Day Two
Day two was all about the raids. We decided to have a bit more sleep and not meet for breakfast today after the excitement of day one. The raids seemed quite heavily focused on the Dusk Mane version of Necrozma, with Dawn Wings seeming few and far between. As a result during the Special Research we mostly opted for Dawn Wings to get the extra Lunar Energy.
We hoped to hit 2000 of each so we could fuse both a shiny, and a non-shiny for the two different fusions, and after our day of raiding I needed to do 3 remotes for Dusk Mane, but was sorted for Dawn Wings thanks to the research. It would have been nice to get a little more energy from each raid, as getting between 90 and 120 felt a little harsh at times.
Shiny rates seemed hit and miss, with some of us getting a bunch, and others really struggling. We loved how often the raids reset, meaning we didn’t have to travel miles and could easily plan our routes with the assumption that raids would have spawned at gyms by the time we got to them.
I ended the day with 41 shinies, a great success! Crabrawler became my white whale of the event, with none shining for me until 17:58 on day two, literally almost at the last minute! My other major aim was a shiny Corsola, and I ended up with 8, so plenty to trade to friends who didn’t manage to get any.
The only shinies I didn’t get that I needed were Dedenne, which I missed out on at London GO Fest last year too, a shiny Dusk Rockruff, and the shiny Unowns. Of our group, only one person got a shiny Unown!
The free for all spawns on Day Two are always fun, and made hunting for our needed shinies easier.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we had a fantastic weekend! What makes a GO Fest weekend for me is the excitement of playing with my friends, and the joy that comes along with that. I’ve had a rough few months, and I literally cried with laughter over the weekend, it was so needed, and I have to give a huge shout out to James, Bev, Becky and Terri for making me smile. Thank you. Darry, Jordan and Annette, it was so good to see you!
The highlights in terms of gameplay were:
- Quick raid turnover
- Hourly field research rotation
- Boosted incense spawns
- Party Play! Pikachu encounter rewards
- Special research being fairly simple
The negatives:
- ‘Complete 3 field research task’ field research task on day two was daft
- Ultra Beast shiny rates felt low
- Special backgrounds were fairly uncommon
- Some lag once the afternoon hit
- Lack of Rare Candy XL as raid rewards, I got 10 across the whole weekend
- The weather, something we can’t blame Niantic for!
In all, we really enjoyed GO Fest Global, but as always, it isn’t the game that makes the day, but the friends that we play it with. I feel very lucky!
