Pokemon: Weird Pokemon Evolutions and Methods

Pokemon evolutions, by and large, are all pretty typical expected gameplay by this point. Level up to a certain point and your Pokemon gets a stat upgrade and a new look – but some evolutions, well they got creative with the criteria for them.

This article is about some of the weird Pokemon evolutions and their unusual requirements.

Pancham and Pangoro

Pancham, the playful Pokemon and little bear shown above, is a fighting type Pokemon.

Fighting-types, you’d often assume would evolve through fighting, or something relating to growing stronger. In actuality, Pancham will only evolve at level 32 or above IF you have another Dark-type Pokemon in your party.

Now, at least this isn’t terribly hard to accidentally discover – if you keep pancham around a lot – either via exp share or actual combat – it should level fairly frequently. And as long as one of those 5 other Pokemon in your party is a dark-type, you’ll get that evolution.

But without looking that up, how do you find out that’s an evolution condition? Pangoro, the Daunting Pokemon, and big bear shown on the right above looks no more or less a dark-type than Pancham does, aside from the fact it’s larger and looks both angrier and more powerful. If visuals like that were the criteria for becoming a dark type, we’d have a lot more dark dual types than we do right now.

At least this evolution is comparatively easy to stumble across though, as with dual-types and 5 other Pokemon team slots, you’ll likely have a dark-type around at some stage. Though you probably wouldn’t realize that having that dark-type played any role in the evolution if you didn’t know about that in advance – earning it a place in this list of weird Pokemon evolutions.

READ MORE: Pokemon Go: Monthly Raid Hours

Sliggoo and Goodra

Sliggoo evolves from Goomy at level 40, as a fairly typical level based evolution – albeit a bit of a late one, though as both are Dragon types later level evolutions are to an extent the expectation you have when trying to evolve it.

Sliggoo evolving into Goodra however is a bit of a different story. You only need to increase the level another 10 times to reach level 50 for the first of its evolution requirements, but naturally, it wouldn’t be here at all if that was the only requirement.

No, to evolve from Sliggoo into Goodra you need the level requirement to be fulfilled AND it to be raining when the level up occurs. Now, veterans of the Pokemon series may say well that’s not too big a problem, I’ll just a move that creates rain, like rain dance.

This would be a great solution to this being a weird Pokemon evolution that respects sometimes a player just wants to evolve the Pokemon and be done with it. That is if doing so worked and fulfilled the requirement for rain.

Apparently, however, Sliggoo doesn’t like player-induced rain as much, because that won’t trigger the evolution. No, Sliggoo is picky and will only evolve in natural rain present in the overworld. Fortunately in the next generation of Pokemon games, this was adjusted to include fog, making it slightly easier to achieve without actively hunting down the required conditions.

Odds are if you’re aware of this requirement you’ll probably do exactly that to hunt down the conditions to evolve it at level 50 and not have to wait for random weather to trigger. This makes it a bit of a curious design choice to say the least – a design choice that singlehandedly earns itself a place on this list of Weird Pokemon evolutions.

READ MORE: Pokemon Legends Arceus Announced

Inkay and Malamar

If you’re familiar at all with the subject of this article prior to reading this in full, you probably expected this entry, as Inkay is something of an infamous example.

Fortunately, unlike Goodra the level requirement for evolving into Malamar from Inkay is a mere level 30, which is a far faster goal to achieve than the level 50 needed for Goodra. The additional condition required for the evolution into Malamar however, raises a few questions.

To evolve from Inkay to Malamar, you have to hit level 30 as stated – and hold the game system upside down while doing so. Is this easy to achieve? Yes, as long as you’re aware of it.

Which raises the question, without knowing about this in advance, how on earth are you intended to discover it?

Is there an NPC hidden away somewhere in each region that explains the wonders of squid evolution and its relation to being upside down as a hint? If not, why isn’t there? Were players intended to guess this based on the appearance of a Pokemon there’s a good chance they rarely if ever saw? – and likely never saw at the same time as Inkay to make the comparison, at that.

Naturally, you can always look up how to evolve anything you want to on the internet if you have access to it – but should a game from a huge series like Pokemon, played by audiences of all ages really be requiring the player to wiki-check how to evolve something in case it has some weird evolution requirement you’d never stumble across in regular gameplay?

I mean, what fraction of players were holding the 3DS upside down to see if it had any gameplay effects or benefits? And of those, how many did it long enough to discover that it did in fact do something for Inkay beyond a certain level?

The only advantage this one has going for it is due to Inkays evolution level requirement being at 30, if you miss it for a few levels and check what you need to evolve Inkay to Malamar, you can easily trigger it on any of the following level ups while levels are still earned quite quickly – definitely deserving of a place on a list of weird Pokemon evolutions.

READ MORE: Pokemon: 7 Underrated Pokemon You Never Use

That’s all for this list of weird Pokemon evolutions. Can you think of any with weird requirements to evolve that weren’t included? Are there any you’d like to see added to a potential follow up list?