So Many Costumed Pokemon

February 2020 is absolutely jam-packed with events for some reason, with everything from a Pokemon Day on 27th February to the return of Armoured Mewtwo, Tornadus coming to raids and the entire month starting with a new research Pokemon with a heart on its nose and a research day for Minccino. In fact, there’s a lot of content in general, but at the same time… there are a lot of Pokemon in costumes to deal with. Actually, there are a lot of costumed Pokemon coming out lately…

On the surface, this doesn’t sound like a great thing. We’re only slowly working our way through Generation 5 in Pokemon Go, one of the larger generations overall. Yet here we are, getting a bunch of Pokemon we already have tons of in various costumes.

Originally though, it was mostly just Pikachu. Sure, there’s Sunglasses Squirtle, from the ‘original’ research community day, where specific Pokestops would guarantee a shiny if you did their research tasks, but that was a long, long time ago and those Sunglasses Squirtles have never came back. But we’ve had all sorts of Pikachus in various hats for years, one for every major holiday. We have Pikachus in santa hats, party hats, cowboy hats, woolly hats, witch hats and even a full Mimikyu costume. That last one doesn’t make any real sense since Mimikyu is a Pokemon disguised as a Pikachu, but oh well.

We have slowly been getting more costumed Pokemon over time. Flower Crown Eevee is pretty cute, but if you want one of each eeveelution, might be a bit tricky since three of them are random. Pikachu and Eevee were the only real costumed Pokemon though until Halloween of 2019, where we suddenly got three new ones – costumed Charmander, Bulbasaur and Squirtle. All dressed as other Pokemon.

None of these costumed Pokemon could evolve, meaning you couldn’t get a Raichu dressed as a Mimikyu, not could you get a Charizard dressed as a Cubone. This trend continues further with the appearance of Party Hat Wurmple, which couldn’t evolve. At the same time, you also couldn’t get Party Hat Rattata or Wynaut, the smaller evolutions of costume Pokemon Raticate and Wobuffet. The trend is about to continue with the end-of-the-month Pokemon Day event, where we’ll get Gengar and Nidorino with party hats too.

This event will also have more, different costumed Pokemon. Or rather, cloned Pokemon. The starter Pokemon, yet again. Whether they evolve or not, I don’t know, but perhaps they will, since you can get the three final evolutions in cloned form via T4 raids.

Armoured Mewtwo will be returning as well, but he’s technically a separate Pokemon who can learn different moves and has different stats. But Armoured Mewtwo is actually the reason why I think all these costumed Pokemon are a good thing: if you don’t have a costumed Pokemon, all you’re doing is missing out on a cosmetic. A cloned Charizard (should) have the same stats as a normal Charizard and a shiny Charizard. Okay, bad example because the best Charizard is one with the community day move Blast Burn, but you get my point. Out of all those Party Hat Wurmples, none of them are as good as a normal Wurmple that can evolve into either its moth or butterfly evolutions. And any Wobuffet is a good Wobuffet.

At the same time, a costumed Pokemon means that we’re less likely to have other Pokemon that will be rare instead. People can chase after these costumed Pokemon and if they don’t get what they want, they won’t be screwed over because you can always pick up some other Charmander or Pikachu or Eevee or whatever.

The only real other issue is having all these costumed Pokemon having space in your limited inventory, but you only ever need one of each costumed Pokemon. Or even none, because costumed Pokemon don’t really have much value unless you have a good or shiny one, and most people will have one (or will be unwilling to do a special trade for one) so you won’t really be trading many of them.

So on the one hand you have old Pokemon in costumes taking up the space of new and rare spawns, but on the other hand, it means that you’re less likely to miss out on anything particularly useful, because they’ll get released on their own.