Pokemon Go’s Small Yet Strong event is missing a valuable opportunity to make players happy
The Pokemon CompanyNiantic announced a new event focused on small Pokemon, boosting the Flabébé encounters worldwide. However, the studio missed an important chance to make Pokemon Go collectors really happy.
Pokemon Go has over 880 creatures available for trainers to hunt. Nonetheless, a selected group appears only in certain areas, making them region-locked.
From Kangaskhan to Bouffalant and even the Legendary Lake Guardians, these creatures can only be obtained by trading them or by traveling across the world to the place where they spawn.
In the same way, some have region-locked variants, as is the case of Furfrou, Vivillon, and Flabébé, which depending on whether you are in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, or the Asia-Pacific region, you will get one version or another.
Small Yet ‘Wrong’ event
The studio recently announced that a new event called Small Yet Strong featuring small creatures will be part of the February calendar. Well-known Pokemon like Nymble, Burmy, Joltik, and more will take part, as well as all the Flabébé variations.
However, while the White Flower and Orange Flower Flabébé can appear anywhere, the Red Flower Flabébé can only be seen in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Blue only spawns in the Asia-Pacific region, and the Yellow in the Americas.
Given that we are talking about a special event to celebrate this type of Pokemon, it is really disappointing that Niantic has not used the opportunity to rotate the Flabébé colors and thus allow avid collectors to complete their Pokedex in its fullest form.
As expected, some players took over the Pokemon Go Reddit page to voice their frustration, with most of them stating that it’s crazy to ask players to travel across countries just to get a variant of a Pokemon they already have.
“The fact that they make these asinine regional rarity decisions and then ALSO make it so that trading globally is cheating (when the Remote Raid system shows that Global Trading could be implemented easily) is just scummy”, a player wrote.
Although letting all the Flabébé colors appear freely in the same location may not be ‘challenging enough’ for players – from Niantic’s point of view – perhaps a fair alternative could be setting them as Egg hatches with low spawn rates, so players will have to walk and use/buy a lot of incubators to get them all.
As one player highlighted in the comment section, “I remember one year they ran an event that allowed region spawns in 7km Eggs. But then they stopped it and gave Alolan forms instead. Wish they would do another region unlock event”.
Although it doesn’t look like players will be able to collect all the Flabébé colors anytime soon, some of this may happen next year during the Go Tour Kalos, as this tiny flower is part of Gen 6. If so, then we could see this replicated with other Pokemon variants.