Collecting All 151 Kanto Pokemon In A Single Day – The Climb #729

Saturday 20^th February 2021

Today was the Pokemon Go Kanto event and it was a crazy day.

I’ve been a little on the fence with Pokemon Go lately. There are things I like, such as the collections and research tasks. And then there are things that really bother me, such as when Niantic seemingly forget that we are in lockdown and shouldn’t be leaving our houses.

The Kanto event was a pay-to-play event. I’m not against throwing money at free games, so long as I am already getting value for money. I look at it the same way as a tipping a waiter. I’ve had an enjoyable time so yeah, I’ll give you money.

I usually get the community day research as that’s normally a pound and it breaks up the monotony of catching hundreds of the same Pokemon. This event was £12, which was a steep price increase, but as it seemed it was going to be very much focused on catching and collections, it looked like it would be fun.

And for the most part it was. I definitely got £12’s worth of enjoyment out of the event.

The way they’d structured it was that every hour (repeated twice over the event) a different batch of Pokemon would appear. There was a collection to complete. There was also additional research, a collection for raiding, a collection for trading (you chose either a red or green badge when you bought your ticket, with some Pokemon being exclusive to each), a collection exclusive to your badge colour, and a collection for evolves.

I’ll be honest and say that I was overwhelmed at the start. There was enough to focus on just trying to complete the hourly collection and shiny hunting. I’m just glad I scrolled down and saw the additional collections for evolving.

So for the first round of hourly spawns, I focused on collections. When I caught something I evolved it to tick off my evolutions. C and I had different badges so we traded to complete the trading collections.

C didn’t have any remote passes (I’m not sure how as there were free ones in the shop) and wanted to spend the second half of the event going to gyms and using premium passes to complete the raid collections. Given that I sold my car during lockdown as I wasn’t using it, it meant that we had to walk.

I’ve not done a lot of exercise during lockdown and have had some health complications over the last year. It meant going out when it was cold has been unwise, and I’ve been waiting until better weather so I could start building my exercise back up. Thankfully, we’ve finally seen things start to warm up so it was perfect weather for me to get out and about. I’d anticipated that we’d probably need to do a bit of walking for this event so this lined up perfectly.

But we walked a lot. Maybe not as much as I would have done when I used to go Geocaching… but for someone who is trying to get long term illness back under control, it is.

We needed to do 8 raids to complete the collection, and I was given the added complication that one of the first legendries we raided, ran. But, thanks in a large part to C and I having submitted new pokestops to our local area over the last couple of years, we have enough gyms that we could stay local and just circle round the estate and get all the raids bar one done.

We ended up using a remote to get that one, but we got it done and I’m glad we did as I don’t think that regional will be coming back to raids before all the collections need to be done.

Niantic also introduced a new feature which are a bit like rocket raids without the rocket. I liked those, and I hope they keep them. It was a good way to stock up on Pokeballs and added something to the game.

The event took us all day, and it was a little stressful at times, but we got everything done. We caught every single kanto Pokemon. We did all the collections, we did all the research.

I’m glad we did – for reasons more than just the accomplishment. Some elements of research and collections have a week to be completed, some were only for the event. I’ve already heard since that the raid element can’t be completed in the 7 days it has to be done because one of the pokemon is no longer in raids.

Whilst others of our friends appeared to be ignoring lockdown and dashing all over the town, we stayed local and were a group consisting of just our support bubble. There’s many of them who missed entire bits of research or collections.

I didn’t do bad on shinies. There were a bunch of new ones released so that the entire Kanto wave can now be shiny. Of the new ones, probably the stars were Hitmonlee, Hitmonchan and Snorlax. I got the first two, including a spare so C didn’t feel salty on missing that one. I’ve not been going hard on shinies the last year so many of the ones I got were ones I needed.

So all in all, it was a good event. Perhaps we went more hardcore at it than we needed to but we got it all done and it means we don’t need to panic about trying to find this or that pokemon to complete a collection over the next week.

I’m certainly going to suffer for it though. Looking down at my mobile for extended periods always screws my back and I feel so knackered after walking solidly for the best part of 6 hours. Still, after telling myself that I needed to start doing some more exercise now that the weather is getting warmer, I can tick that off the list.

I may give myself a few days before venturing out again though.