Pokémon GO Fest 2025: Jersey City, the first one to take place under new Niantic, Inc. owners Scopely, Inc., does a lot of things right while also missing the mark on just a few things. Due to rain being forecasted on my Park Experience Day (Saturday morning), I first stopped by during the Friday Afternoon session to check the various entertainment, shopping, and photo opportunities out before any potential showers could spoil the fun.
I’m On The Road to Viridian Ci- Errr…Jersey City!
The location for Pokémon GO Fest 2025: Jersey City was surprisingly great. This year’s event for the United States took place in Liberty State Park in Jersey City, New Jersey. The section of the park that it used was alongside New York Harbor, and it was surreal to turn around and randomly see the Statute of Liberty in the background. It was fairly easy to get to if you were staying in Newark or Jersey City itself, and it was just a ferry ride away from New York City. I stayed near the Newark Airport, and I was able to get fairly easily to the event through public transportation with just an additional 20-minute walk. The location also meant that Pokémon GO Fest was all fairly compacted together in a way that Randall Park for Pokémon GO Fest 2023 and 2024 just wasn’t. Having attended a large number of Pokémon GO in-person events by this point, I can confidently say that having a more compact playing area makes for a much better overall gameplay and trading experience.
The four different habitats of Pokémon GO Fest 2025: Jersey City were really well themed, and each had their own centralized ‘weenie’ (to borrow a term from Walt Disney) that drew your attention to them. For Carnival Grounds, there was a real-life carnival set up that reminded me of the Pokémon GO Tour event from earlier this year (but without the Ferris Wheel). For Mechanical Marvels, there were a lot of real-life module replicas put up everywhere, and for Noble Fields there was a giant castle gate welcoming people into the battle grounds. Finally, for Sunken Treasure, there was a giant sunken ship with a huge treasure chest photo opportunity tucked inside.
Each of these areas themselves had something to do in them besides play Pokémon GO. If you wanted to meet notable trainers like Tru Inferno or JTGilly, then you could absolutely do so. If you wanted to meet some of the artists for Pokémon GO, then they were on hand too! Or if you just wanted to hang out with other trainers and trade Pokémon, then you could do so at each of the team lounges. All of these different activities were smartly spread out around the four areas so that there was genuinely a reason to visit and linger in each one beyond catching Pokémon. The one seriously baffling omission though was the lack of water stations available throughout the Park Experience. If you needed water, your options were to either go back to Carnival Grounds to get it (which is a trek if you’re all the way deep into Sunken Treasure) or to buy it for $4 a piece from the food trucks. There should be water stations available in each of the four areas for people to get water from, and I just don’t understand how this wasn’t done. It does get hot playing outside in June, and people can get overheated without easily available water to cool down with.
There were all kinds of things to see and do at Pokemon GO Fest 2025: Jersey City, even though there was also a lot of rain. (Photos by author).
Of course, it wouldn’t be Pokémon GO Fest without having Pokémon to catch! This year’s Mythical Pokémon was Volcanion, who is able to be caught at the end of the Park Experience Special Research. I am going to be honest: I didn’t get to complete the research. I was too busy catching other Pokémon, raiding, and doing the activities to really focus on completing the research in a timely manner. That said, the special research had you go from area to area to collect Pokémon in each section to complete the required tasks towards your Mythical Pokémon – but if you picked to start in Sunken Treasure, then you were going to have to walk all the way to the far end of the gameplay area and work your way back first.
The main raid focus this year was for the Legendary Pokémon from Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield: Zacian and Zamazenta in their Hero of Many Battles form. I purchased the Raid Lover add-on, which gave me an additional 18 daily raid passes for the event to the nine that the in-person event gives you already. I wound up using all of them during the event and I caught one shiny Zacian (with the Jersey City special background!) and no shiny Zamazenta. I was disappointed but the capture rate was extremely high, and I don’t think I had any raid Pokémon run away.
The one thing that did bother me though was that I didn’t see any Gigantamax raids during Pokémon GO Fest 2025: Jersey City, and I was definitely looking around for them. Looking online, there was apparently one per Park Experience session in Jersey City. This was absolutely not advertised on social media, on the website, or in email in the leadup to Pokémon GO Fest 2025: Jersey City, and I think that is a serious problem. You have this cool, new, gameplay feature that I absolutely missed out on despite wanting to be a part of that I only knew about from having seen clips of it from Pokémon GO Fest 2025: Osaka. It would have been far more epic to have it happen once an hour, at the 45 minute or so mark, spread across the four areas so everyone can jump into the lobby and participate. This was solidly one of the biggest disappointments of the entire event for me because of how it was done.
The diversity of Pokémon to catch in each area was great, and I liked that there were Spinda and costumed Pikachu that were exclusive to each of the four areas. It meant that even after I finished whatever task in a particular area I needed to do, I still stuck around long enough to hunt down those two additional Pokémon before I could move on. The only truly baffling choice was Vanillish, as we JUST had a Community Day for that Pokémon a month ago. The return of the Unown Pokémon at the top of each hour for two minutes was an appreciated – and missed – touch, especially with the return of ? and ! Unown to be caught. All of the other Pokémon in the mix were fine, and I found myself catching and evolving several of them to help fill out my Pokédex.
I just wish there were more Pokémon spawns in each area. I kept having to use a combination of incense and Palkia’s Spatial Raid to boost the number of encounters present. It felt like I was easily clearing out each area that I was trying to catch Pokémon in, which is crazy for an in-person event. Along those lines, I was surprised that there were no 10-kilometer eggs with some crazy rare Pokémon inside for this event. It really made me feel like the Egg Lover add-on, which decreases the amount of walking you need to do to hatch an egg during the event, was kind of pointless.
Gotta Catch ‘Em All…Even The Merch!
The biggest change, and one that I cannot sing enough praises about, is how the merchandising was handled this year for the event. In prior years, especially at Pokémon GO Fest 2022: Seattle, the merchandise line could take several hours to get into the tent for, shop, and then get out of. If you’re only at the park area for the four-hour block that your ticket is good for, then you’re going to be spending a significant amount of time in line to check out the plush, keychains, t-shirts, and more that are available to buy.
This year, Niantic, Inc., put in place an extremely successful pre-order plan to help alleviate the problem. They have done preorders before at their Pokémon GO Tour events, but this went far beyond anything I had seen previously. All of the items, with the exception of the GORUCK Pokémon-themed backpacks and ultimately the event pins, were easily pre-orderable for several weeks leading up into the event alongside the ticket. I found myself able to, even a week-ish beforehand, order that event sweatshirt I had been going back-and-forth on. At the event itself there was a fully separate queue, on the other side of the merchandise pavilion, that let me pick up my event swag with a simple QR scan. All of this meant if you wanted a t-shirt or a tote bag or whatever exclusive to the in-person Pokémon GO Fest 2025: Jersey City, you knew you were going to be able to get it and could make all the arrangements beforehand. This had the collateral effect of making the merchandise line for the event itself incredibly short. I made a point to stop by several times on both Friday afternoon and on Saturday morning to see how the line was functioning, and it was far, far shorter than I had ever expected it to be due to the lack of forced scarcity of almost all the items and the ease to get the event merchandise.
Merchandise for sale at Pokémon GO Fest 2025: Jersey City. (Photos by author.)
Pokémon GO Fest 2025: Jersey City did introduce a new partnership for this event with Gengar, Pikachu, and Wobbuffet GORUCK backpacks. These backpacks, retailing for $119.99 each, came with a code to equip your character in Pokémon GO with the exact same item. I was able to check them out in person, and I was surprised at the backpacks being fairly durable and yet discreet enough that you probably wouldn’t know it was Pokémon-themed if you weren’t a fan of the series. Unfortunately, unlike other GORUCK products, these backpacks do not have built-in stabilization for iron plates. This means that if you’re hoping to ruck with plates like so many other GORUCK products, then you’re going to be sorely disappointed. Ultimately, this was an item that sold out extremely quickly in the pre-orders and then later on in the online Pokémon Center store.
The other items exclusive to this event are two types of pins. The first is the city-exclusive Pokémon GO Fest 2025 pin. At the prior Pokémon GO Fest and Pokémon GO Tour events I’ve attended, they were given out at the team tents for answering trivia questions or showing off requested Pokémon, or really anything else. This year, they were locked behind either being a Community Ambassador and requesting it at the Community Ambassador tent (which has a whole process to go through to become one) or winning three matches, non-sequentially, in the battle grounds in the Noble Field area.
I am not a fan of this change. I personally do not do PVP, and I am not hardcore enough to collect and rate and use candy (and eventually bottle caps) to build a complimentary team that can take on anything thrown at it by strangers. With a winner-stays policy, that meant I had to keep going to the back of the line in order to try to win a battle. I soon turned to the coaches that were available on the sidelines to help me build up an (okay-ish) team, and it still took a long while for me to rack up three wins to earn my pin. I’m not a big fan of locking an event-exclusive item behind a part of the gameplay that I simply do not participate in regularly, and I really hope that this doesn’t become a regular feature for Pokémon GO Fest and Pokémon GO Tour going forward.
The other exclusive item was a pin attached to the Premier Access add-on. This hybrid physical/digital add-on for $100 USD gave you a special entry to the merchandise store, access to a Premiere Access lounge, and a lapel pin that you could only get at the Premier Access lounge. It also gave you a TON (seriously, check the link to see it all) of in-game balls, incubators, modules, battle passes, and more that far exceeded the price tag attached to it. This sold out as soon as it was put up for the Saturday morning Park Experience. If you are a hardcore Pokémon GO fan and you are willing to spend real life money on the game, then this was absolutely worth it for the in-game items alone. I think my only real complaint about it is that there just wasn’t enough available to satisfy anyone who would have possibly picked it up, and I think a lot of people would have bought it for the in-game items alone if they could have.
Even Arceus Couldn’t Stop This Water-Type Event
It rained both in the Friday afternoon slot and during the Saturday morning slots. A lot of people brought out umbrellas, which turned out to be definitely needed if you wanted to keep swiping at your phone to catch Pokémon during the showers. The only thing I think I saw shutdown was the Pikachu/Eevee character meet-and-greet, but everything else proceeded like normal – but with a lot more crowding than you’d otherwise expect under the various team tents. Pokémon GO Fest is absolutely an event that can be successfully held in rain or shine, and the weather didn’t detract from it – as long as you had a way to cover yourself and your phone up.
Finally, there was the City Experience. Aside from the morning/afternoon time of your Park Experience Day being the City Experience, you could also purchase it for the other days between Thursday and Sunday that you weren’t in Liberty State Park for. I was surprised to find that this was limited literally to New York City and Jersey City. I was staying in Newark, along with a lot of other trainers who came to this event, and it was crazy to me that the event range didn’t stretch out that far for Pokémon GO Fest 2025: Jersey City. Putting the City Experience into New York City made the non-park event feel like a re-run of the past two years with a focus on New York instead of giving New Jersey a real chance to shine. I ended up not going into New York City while I was at this event for a number of reasons (cost, time, transportation, et cetera) and my City Experience was definitely hurt because of it. That said, I absolutely did go wondering around parts of Jersey City to catch Pokémon and to do raids in, and I found quite a few trainers I could do things with as well. The City Experience definitely is worth it if you have a dedicated group of people with you that you want to raid with.
If you’ve made it this far, then you’re probably wondering if Pokémon GO Fest is worth going to. The answer is unequivocally still ‘yes.’ There is so much to do and see and enjoy for anyone who is a fan of Pokémon and Pokémon GO. There are definitely issues for sure (as I have laid out above), but it doesn’t ruin the overall atmosphere of the event.
If nothing else, then just know this. My personal goal for Pokémon GO Fest 2025: Jersey City was to finish out my Unown collection with all 26 letters and two punctuations. And to my surprise, I was finally able to do so at the very end when I found someone who was able to trade me the letter ‘K’ that I was missing for almost nothing in return. The Pokémon GO community is unlike any other in that respect: if you’re just trying to finish out your Pokédex and you’re not seeking something absurdly rare like a floating Pikachu or this year’s new must-have, Stonjourner, then you will find someone here who will have it. Niantic, Inc., has really helped to build a community that lifts each other up and wants to help each other succeed in catching them all and exploring the world around them. I really hope that even with a new owner, Niantic, Inc., will continue to foster that kind of environment in the future.
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Did you go to any of the Pokémon GO Fest 2025 events?
What Pokémon would you like to see featured at a Pokémon GO Fest event?
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