Pokémon GO Tour: Sinnoh – Los Angeles!
February 18, 2024
So at the time of writing this blog, I have very little memory of GO Tour: Sinnoh due to health complications and being in a dizzy haze when I was barely in recovery. This will mainly be a recap of what I can remember from photos my parents and I have taken! And fun fact, we actually only found out about this tour because one of my father's colleagues mentioned it!
Gifts and Merch!
I bought a shirt at the event during event hours! I had no idea we could pre-order t-shirts since this was the first tour we bought tickets to, so I had no idea how to navigate the website at the time. My mother was the one who managed to get the tickets last-second. It's a really cool shirt with Palkia (Origin Forme) and Dialga (Origin Forme), and they only had the large size, so it was perfect! They sold out after a couple customers after me. If I could go back, I absolutely would have bought their pins too.
But you can tell they were unprepared. They ran out of merchandise before mid-day. Limited merchandise as a general idea is fine, but these players arriving to Los Angeles are already paying for their ticket and whatever extra purchase they're making for raid passes, egg incubators, extra Pokémon storage, extra item bag storage, plane tickets, overnight hotel stays, and event-exclusive in-game merchandise. It's disappointing if paying players can't obtain a shirt because Niantic felt like limiting their stock.
The Event!
It was insanely packed, so many players were running around and you can tell everyone was having a great time! I heard a rumor that it was the first milestone Niantic has broke for the amount of people at one Pokémon event of theirs. The Pokémon that were featured were amazing, new Hisui Pokémon, new forms, new evolutions and Unown (that I unfortunately didn't get to catch or even see, for that matter.)
The tasks were simple and fun and it made you go around the entire Rose Bowl Park! You had to catch one of each Pokémon that were in each habitat, which I managed to complete. There were four different rotating habitats, each with their own structure that you can visit and take pictures in front of! You can tell they loved the time VS space theme. It really shows—these structures are gorgeous!
The Rose Bowl!
... I have never had worse food from a stadium.
To start with, there were 0 vendors other than the food trucks in the middle of the field, so not only were the lines insanely long, but the stadium used their own food stalls and after going to GO Tour: Unova, it shows. Their chicken was rubber and their drinks were bitter when they should have been sweet. I didn't eat that morning, so I knew I was screwed when I couldn't finish that meal. I toughed it out for the rest of the day.
But the field itself was clean and their trash management was good. There were hardly any seating areas so many people either stayed in the stadium or sat on wet grass. The team tents, though, were packed! Everyone was talking and having a good QnA session there with rewards for questions that someone answered correctly :) I stood around for a brief moment to listen to the questions they were asking, but I had NO idea what the answers were, so I left shortly after LOL.
The weather was cloudy, so it was perfectly comfortable in a hoodie and jeans. I hadn't adopted my decora style yet! They also had inflatable balloons of different Sinnoh 'mons all around the entire place! We managed to find Piplup hidden behind the Rose Bowl Stadium! There were also Dialga and Palkia, but I didn't have the heart at the time to stand in line to get a picture with them.
They also had a bunch of maps everywhere which I appreciated. I had no idea where to go sometimes. I wasn't used to walking around on my own at this point in time. There were powerbanks as well that were designed as PokéStops which were so fun to hang out at when my personal powerbank lost power.
Pokémon Caught!
I caught so many legendaries in this event, it was actually unbelievable. We were actually walking out and leaving the event when I managed to catch the most amazing Pokémon in my entire GO account life: A shiny Origin Forme Palkia. As you can tell from the smiling face logo, I quickly made them my buddy! He's still my buddy as of writing this blog :) There were Mesprit, Azelf and Uxie everywhere, but they were nearly impossible to catch. I don't know if that was intentional, but I even heard people around me complain that they literally couldn't catch them no matter what they did. I think they made the chances astronomically low for how often they spawned, which is really weird to me. But I'm happy with my Palkia :)
Gallery
