(Third day of playing; played throughout the day on campus and around Safeway near my apartment on my phone)
I guess I could get around to discussing actually playing the game rather than my thoughts on the overall mechanics, changes, etc. Admittedly, at first it was fun to jump back into Pokémon Go. I had already played and it wasn’t all that different, so it was relatively easy to pick up where I left off without the learning curve of being a new player or the frustration of starting over completely.
I was a bit more self-conscious about playing now than I was when the game initially launched and it seemed like everyone was playing, though. Back then I could always pick other players out of a crowd; now I feel like I’m the only person on campus who plays – obviously not true, as I see gym colors change all the time, but it’s the feeling I get.
Having new pokémon to catch is fun, but it didn’t take long for me to find all of the common first and second generation pokémon that I hadn’t already caught in California when I played the first time. 
There were very few “shadows” indicating a pokémon I hadn’t caught before by my third day playing the game, which is frustrating considering the short amount of time it took for me to accomplish it. When I look at my pokédex it indicates that I haven’t even seen half of the pokémon released through the game, even after playing in many distinct areas in two different states (I’ve seen 99 out of 247, and have only caught 84 out of the 99 I’ve seen).
It’s a bit frustrating to play a game where the goal is to “catch them all” that simultaneously making it feel impossible to do so. This could be solved by adding the trading mechanic shown in trailers but notoriously absent from the game almost a year after launch. While Nintendo and Niantic have successfully made “minds, bodies, and social interaction…increasingly “occupied” by Nintendo activities and purchases” (in this case, Pokémon) through their app, their desire to launch the product quickly seems to have leeched it of the soul that the traditional handheld games possessed (Kline 126).
Bringing Pokémon to our phones in an augmented reality experience makes it so Nintendo (and by extension Niantic) can bring their game into lives in an unprecedented way. While there have been successful – and likely better – augmented reality games in the past, none have been so “above all profitable for the colonizer” with “sensational virtual aggression and simple navigational pleasures” (Kline 127). Pokémon Go was brilliantly marketed, and felt new enough to attract masses of players on its first launch; even after such huge initial success, the app feels like its still struggling. I’m not quite tired of it – yet – but we’ll see how long that takes.