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There are really two halves to this year’s Pokémon GO Tour event, titled Pokémon GO Tour: Kalos – Los Angeles: the daytime park experience and the brand-new Mega Night event. Both of these events were separately ticketed, and both of them were vastly different experiences to play in. I’ll be taking them up one at a time because of this.
Pokémon GO Tour: Kalos – Los Angeles is the third time Pokémon GO Tour has been held at the Rose Bowl stadium and upon the neighboring Brookside Golf and Country Club. This year’s event, unlike prior years, had only three habitats that roam from the Rose Bowl itself to a decent way down the golf course itself: Central Village, Mountain Manor, and Coastal Laboratory.
While last year was marked by a Ferris wheel and a lot of carnival games, this year definitely stepped up the game with themed housing. Central Village had a real, working fountain with a city backdrop, Mountain Manor had a Ghost-type haunted house interior, and Coastal Laboratory had a spread-out outdoor laboratory scene that invoked all three Pokémon GO teams. It really feels like each Pokémon GO Tour event gets more and more elaborate with their set pieces, and this one (other than the section that had the Ferris wheel, because come on — it’s a FERRIS WHEEL!) is the best so far.
There were quite a few charging spots throughout the play area, and it felt like you weren’t too far away from either of the two tented team areas lined with benches for trading and answering trivia questions. You could also meet famous social media Pokémon GO trainers, there was a Community Ambassador Hub spot and a Wayfarer Tent, mascot meet and greets inside the Rose Bowl Stadium, inflatable photo opportunities (inside and outside the Rose Bowl Stadium) and you could even meet some of the artists for Pokémon GO. There was even a spot where you could stand in front of a giant screen, get a Pokémon randomly selected for you, and then get a photo and a small dance clip sent to your phone (along with an item code!). Overall, there were definitely plenty of things to do while you were catching Pokémon, and it really helped make the eight hours of gameplay just fly by.
However, a Pokémon GO in-person event lives – or whites out – on its gameplay. This is unfortunately where things fell short.
The two major advertised focuses for the daytime park experience were the debut of Mega Victreebel and Mega Malamar. While I was able to get multiple background themes for them, I unfortunately was not able to catch any shiny ones. What was a bit confusing was that Xerneas and Yveltal (the Kalos legendaries) were also in raids, but they weren’t given any new Adventure Effects like we saw with Roar Of Time or Ice Burn from prior legendaries. There was a natural end point for the Mega Raids, as you can only hold 10,000 Mega Energy for any particular Mega Pokémon at a time, and that functioned as a soft cap on the Mega Victreebel and Mega Malamar.
What ended up happening, at least from my experience, was that after people capped out the Mega Victreebel and Mega Malamar Energy and had leveled them up as far as they wished with that energy, people then chased down the Xerneas and Yveltal legendaries for the remainder of the event to try to get that shiny/background card combination.
Even though there were only three areas in this event, the raid spots were fairly spread out, and it felt like there were too few of them in any given place. This resulted in people roaming around, hunting down legendaries’ spawn spots, and trying to hit whatever few they could reach that were available during the time windows. I also do not think the shiny rate was boosted much (if at all), as I got zero shiny raid Pokémon over the entire Saturday play spot after utilizing 70 passes – and I was not the only one who experienced that.
The Pokémon field spawn pools weren’t great. With the exception of Furfrou (easily my favorite part of the whole experience, as I will talk about later), almost all of the Pokémon in the three areas had a Community Day event in the past year (examples: Eevee, Flabébé), were part of another recent-ish Pokémon GO event (examples: Swirlix, Spritzee, Noibat), or were common spawns that most people encounter anyway. Other than Pikachu with Kalos region hats, there were no exclusive new Pokémon costumes, nor was there even a collection medal offered as part of a Timed Research for collecting them in each area. This ultimately meant that other than occasionally shiny checking, I simply didn’t bother to catch much in the field. Honestly, even just catching the region-exclusive Flabébé color variants and having those spread across the three areas would have been perfect. Overall, it made me really miss the days of Cowboy Hat Snorlax and the uniqueness you could only get at an in-person event.
The 10-kilometer eggs, on the other hand, were amazing. Pokémon GO Tour: Kalos – Los Angeles had the debut of shiny Klefki (France-exclusive) and Hawlucha (Mexico-exclusive). I ended up hatching so many 10 kilometer eggs during the event, and I was thrilled I was able to get a single shiny Hawlucha and it is gorgeous. With the focus on the new shiny debuts for those two Pokémon, and the heavy amount of 10 kilometer eggs I kept getting, I actually thought this part of the event was done incredibly well. It definitely helped that I have been saving all of my incubators since Pokémon GO Fest in 2025 for this event, as I was able to just keep hatching more and more eggs all throughout Pokémon GO Tour: Kalos – Los Angeles. It also meant I wasn’t impulsively shiny checking everything to see if I was getting lucky. Instead, I could do raids and other content and hope for a new shiny region-exclusive to hatch every-so-often.
My favorite part of Pokémon GO Tour: Kalos – Los Angeles was the Furfrou collection. If you aren’t familiar with them, Furfrou is a Pokémon from Pokémon X and Pokémon Y that give different styled haircuts. This has been carried over to Pokémon GO by region-locking the trims to different aspects of the world, and keeping the Heart Trim time-locked to Valentine’s Day. This means that if you want to have a full set of Furfrou variants (and who wouldn’t?), you have to visit everywhere from Egypt to Japan to the Americas to make it happen. Pokémon GO Tour: Kalos – Los Angeles made it so that you can get all of the different variants, if you are standing beneath a relevant in-game PokéStop advertising that trim, you pay 10,000 Stardust, and you use 25 Furfrou candy. The game helpfully provided a ton of Furfrou everywhere to catch, and Timed Research to ensure you wouldn’t run out of Furfrou and candy that easily. This had me running around EVERYWHERE to get all the different kinds. If there was a Furfrou to catch, I definitely caught it.
There is one aspect of Pokémon GO Tour: Kalos – Los Angeles that I flat out did not like, and that is the fact there was a timed Zygarde research, but the route that started it was not inside the park play experience. Instead, you had to go elsewhere in Los Angeles to find a start route spot to get the timed Zygarde research. I flew in for this event, and I did not rent a car. This meant that if I wasn’t actively playing the event at the Rose Bowl stadium, I was taking public transportation to get around and back to my hotel. I flat out did not get this timed research because I could not get to a starting spot for it. It also was not advertised on the Pokémon GO Tour: Kalos – Los Angeles webpage as part of the gameplay experience. It was genuinely frustrating to know there is an arguably-secret piece of Legendary-themed gameplay out there for this ticketed Saturday event that is not accessible inside the event space itself.
Mega Night, though, was almost perfect. This event took place an hour after the Pokémon GO Tour: Kalos – Los Angeles park experience ended, and it ran for two hours solely inside the Central Village area against a music backdrop being live curated by DJ GlitchxCity. The idea was that every 10 minutes, a new wave of Mega Pokemon — ranging from Charizard to Gardevoir and more — would spawn in five-star raids to catch. After that 10 minutes was up, there would be a five-minute cool down and then the next Mega Pokémon would show up. I quickly fell into a group of four other people, and we started to run a pathway through Central Village to do as many raids as possible during those 10 minutes. It felt like the shiny rate for these was boosted, as I ended up with several shiny Mega (with background!) Pokémon from this event.
Also, everyone got a light up wristband you could change the color to be for your team. I wish the magnetic clasp was stronger, and I ended up having to put it into my backpack just so I wouldn’t lose it.
What I think was the absolute BEST part of Pokémon GO Tour: Kalos – Los Angeles was the Mega Dragonite raids. That went for a full two cycles to close out the night, and all of the Dragonites had the background. That meant that if you did a Dragonite raid, and you were able to clear it (and catch the Pokémon, but I had none of them run away at all), you were going to walk away with special background souvenir to show everyone that you were here at the Rose Bowl for Mega Night. Yes, I get that ‘if everyone is special, then no one is’ is a shiny philosophy for Pokémon GO, but guaranteeing the background was the smartest way possible to make sure everyone left the first ever Mega Night event feeling like they got something special and amazing. I really, REALLY hope Scopely takes this to heart and continues to do something like this for any future Mega Night events.
That said, I had two issues with the Mega Night event: we were all held in the Rose Bowl stadium itself for the hour until the Mega Night started, and that meant some people lost some prime Mega Charizard (it was the first raid) raid time as they were exiting the tunnels. Also, the field spawns were just trash, as well. I wish the five minutes in between raid spawns had something happening with field spawns. At least during the daytime park event, Unown popped up for two minutes at the top of every hour. Despite that, Mega Night was honestly so much fun, and I don’t know anyone who didn’t love every single bit of it. It is an instant buy add-on for me from now on, and I hope Scopely does it again in Chicago for Pokémon GO Fest later this year. I wouldn’t be upset if Scopely ran it for three hours next time they did it, as it sure didn’t feel like two hours had elapsed by the time it was over and it left me wanting more. And leaving me with wanting more gameplay, after having done a full daytime experience, is the best possible way to do a brand-new after-hours event.
The last thing I want to touch on is the merchandise. You could, until just before the Pokémon GO Tour: Kalos – Los Angeles event started, pre-order a bunch of Kalos-themed merchandise and it didn’t run out online like it has sometimes beforehand. Whether that is due to lower demand or higher production amounts, I don’t know, but I was happy I could add one more shirt onto my overall order just days before the event itself. The pre-order pickup line also was a complete breeze, and all I had to do was show my QR code to get all my items (and yes, that even included my later added-on T-shirt!). It was a great experience and one I had no issues with.
What was new, though, was that this was the first time Pokémon GO Tour had a pop-up shop on site. It was big, and it had a lot of Pokémon GO and regular Pokémon themed-items for sale. I ended up buying an Unown plush for myself, and that was because I already have a ton of Pokémon merchandise at home. They even had some of the Pikachu GORUCK backpacks from Pokémon GO Fest last year in stock! The checkout process was incredibly smooth, too. What really got me, though, was that the merchandise was fully restocked not only before the start of each park day experience but before Mega Night as well! So, you had two chances a day to get something you wanted, if you were ticketed for both events, and the Mega Night merchandise line was so much shorter than during the daytime. I have zero complaints about how this was handled, and I think I really hope that this pop-up comes back again for next year’s Pokémon GO Tour event.
The merchandise for sell at Pokémon GO Tour: Kalos – Los Angeles rivaled anything seen at a Pokémon GO Fest event. (Photos by author).
Overall, what do I think about this year’s Pokémon GO Tour: Kalos – Los Angeles?
It was a mixed event, for me. The park experience wasn’t as great as prior Pokémon GO Tour events. I really wish the Legendary raids had something special to chase for them, and the field spawns had a reason (even a collection medal!) to hunt them all down. The new Mega Pokémon were fun to catch, at least at first, but the raid spawns were too far apart. The new region-exclusive shiny egg hatches and the Furfrou trims were fantastic. The displays and all of the activities to do were amazing though, and I had so much fun with them. The merchandise experience was bigger and better than ever, but the fact there was a timed research tied to forced gameplay away from the stadium that wasn’t advertised well is a serious problem. What really saved everything and made me happy with the overall event was Mega Night and how Scopely handled Mega Dragonite during it, but that was a separately ticketed event on top of the park experience ticket.
I am going to score both the Park Experience and the Mega Night experience separately, since they really were two different events that occurred over one day. I really hope Scopely takes all of these experiences to heart for next year’s Pokémon GO Tour event and for the upcoming Pokémon GO Fest event in Chicago. I love Pokémon GO, I really do. I am excited beyond belief to see how Pokémon Wave and Pokémon Wind gets incorporated into Pokémon GO as we march into 2027, not to mention how they will ultimately incorporate Paradox Pokémon from Pokémon Violet and Pokémon Scarlet into the game.
Pokémon GO Tour: Kalos – Los Angeles Park Experience:
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Pokémon GO Tour: Kalos – Los Angeles Mega Night:
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