Difference between smallish Japansese towns and home

One thing is for certain. There are a lot of sponsored stops and gyms in Japan. Now I've only had the opportunity to try my luck at smallish towns/cities (everything is relative I guess), with some 40K to 200K inhabitants.

The difference from Sweden, where I'm used to play, is simply astounding. To begin with we have very few sponsored stops. As in I've spent the better part of a year getting to level 39 in a 600K inhabitant city area without ever seeing one.

We're talking the blatantly sponsored ones here. It's quite possible that there's a different business model where sponsored stops look like normal ones, you know with a photo of a location and all that.

The result is that back home I expect to see a high density of stops/gyms in central areas, including centres of satellite towns, which peters out into nothingness the further away you come from the business to consumer infrastructure.

It also means that while the density is high, you'd very seldom expect to reach more than two resources from one location. Walk another twenty metres and there's another stop/gym and then fifty metres to the next two.

It's hugely efficient for the old school way of hatching eggs while throwing balls at spawns without really running out of them. Using slow moving trams for refilling your bag is also a dream. 150 items of the type you prefer (which means well over 250 in total) in less than half an hour is a given.


Here in Japan (the tiny part of Japan that I visited) resources come in clusters, mostly tied to small parks and shopping malls. Reaching four or five of them from one position is perfectly possible.

Problem being that when you leave them you immediately run into a deserted nothingness despite going past bars, restaurants, coffee shops and a variety of shops in what passes for town centres.

Then the next cluster.

You could very well see absolutely nothing but the occasional spawn for several hundred metres in between.

Also, in the middle of nowhere, if there's a 'shop' belonging to one of the big chains that bought sponsored stops (think 7eleven, McDonalds, and so on), well you'll find a lonely stop there for cetrain.

Players here should love gym version 2. The PoGo landscape didn't promote moving around in the first place, and now you can hunt down the nicer contents from 10 kilometre eggs from inside a shopping mall or a park.


I won't say that it's better back home, but it's definitely what I'm used to. I'd go bonkers if I couldn't reliably spin two dozen stops and throw balls at some thirty of forty mons on my way from one raid to another. Because that's what I grew used to from gym raiding during the previous gym system.

A good raid back then invariably resulted in the relative loss of over a hundred balls and at least 12K stardust gained (and used). Not to mention a minimum of 5 kilometres added to the incubators.


So, what would be your preference?