Mega Pokemon have arrived in Pokemon GO and they’re basically inaccessible!

Yay! Mega Evolutions have arrived! For Beedrill and the three Kanto Starters! Amazing! And three of them require huge amounts of raids to obtain! Woo!

If you can’t tell already, I’m being somewhat sarcastic. While I had sat on my ass and hoped that maybe the data miners were wrong, well, they weren’t. Mega Evolutions aren’t some cool thing to unlock with your best buddy. It’s a grind that involves doing lots of raids.

Raid, raid, raid.

So, to get your Mega Evolution of choice, you need to do Mega Evolution Raids for the Pokemon you want to Mega Evolve. I hope your Pokemon of choice is a Kanto starter, because that’s all we’ve got right now. Mega Raids are about the same level as Legendary raids (probably a bit higher, closer to the T6 Darkrai raids from last year), but feature Mega Pokemon.

You beat the Mega Pokemon and… you get some Mega Candy and a normal Pokemon. You get between 30 and 50 candy, depending on how quickly you finish the raid. The candy is what’s important, because you need a lot of it. You need 200 for your first Kanto starter Mega Evolution, and 50 candy for every Mega Evolution after that. Which requires a minimum of 2 raids, when you can only do one free raid per day.

And that’s just for one species of Pokemon. You need 600 total candy (a minimum of 12 raids in optimal circumstances) to be able to Mega Evolve a Charizard, Blastoise and Venusaur once each.

All this for 4 hours of Mega Evolution time.

Yeah, your Mega Evolved Beedrill, Venusaur, Blastoise or Charizard will only be Mega Evolved for 4 hours. So you had better plan ahead! Mega Evolutions have far superior stats over their normal counterparts and give a damage boost to everyone present in a raid. Planning ahead is almost vital if you want to make use of your time with a Mega Evolved Pokemon.

Oh, by the way, you can only have one Mega Evolved Pokemon at a time. Which would kinda suck if you Mega Evolved a Venusaur for Blastoise raids and only get to do one.

We only got a very small handful of Pokemon too.

Which begs the question: what happens when the Kanto starters are no longer in Mega Raids? If I haven’t managed to get 200 Mega Charizard Candy, how do I evolve my Charizard? And what about Beedrill? Okay, sure, there’s no reason to use Mega Beedrill right now, but how do you get more Mega Candy for that, since it’s not in raids and given via research?

This is an absolutely massive problem that literally can’t be solved by the current system. If you release all the Megas at once, then you have no chance of finding the Mega Pokemon you want. But releasing them in waves as they are, and you’re screwed if you don’t stock up on candy while they’re around.

For the amount of effort required, it’s simply not worth it.

What do you even use Mega Evolutions for? In large raid groups, the group damage bonus is useless, since bosses die insanely fast anyway. For raids with fewer players, Mega Evolutions could make 2-player and 3-player raids more accessible. But since you get candy based on the time it takes to beat a raid, small raid groups need to do more raids to keep Mega evolutions going. And on top of that, since it’s a temporary bonus, you might not feel like there’s EVER a time to use Mega Pokemon.

You can’t use Mega Evolutions in PvP either for now. So… is it just an expensive Pokedex entry? Something to show off briefly? Who knows? Either way,

I suppose the only good thing is a handful of answers.

We at least learned that you can’t Mega Evolve clone Pokemon or shadow Pokemon. The later is almost certainly for the best, since a Shadow Mega Mewtwo would outclass literally everything else in the game, with literally any move. Clone Pokemon… I don’t get why, since 1. there’s only three of them (the Kanto starter evolutions) and 2. why can’t they just use their base forms?

While some people have confirmed that Blastoise with Sunglasses CAN Mega Evolve though, that might not be true for other costume Pokemon. I very much doubt Gengar with a party hat will be able to Mega Evolve, although it’s basically the same as a Sunglasses Blastoise.

If I were you, I’d wait.

Something has to change. I don’t think I’ve seen a single person happy with how Mega Evolutions have come out. That being said, there are SO MANY easy ways to make Mega Evolutions more palatable. Anything from removing the candy cost after a Pokemon’s first Mega Evolution, to making them last longer, to making Mega Candy more like Rare Candy.

It’s so damn annoying. This whole system could have been so damn cool. But no, it’s just milking us for premium raid passes.