A Quick Look At Sending Pokemon from Pokemon GO to Pokemon HOME

Finally, Pokemon GO has some sort of connection to other Pokemon games. Sure, it’s a rather tentative, one-way path, but it’s there. Now, you can transfer Pokemon from Pokemon GO to Pokemon HOME. However, the process is one-way, and you can’t transfer anything to Pokemon GO. Not that you really need to, considering how many Legendaries you can get in Pokemon GO. All it requires is some patience and a Nintendo account.

The process is kinda simple.

After you have connected a Nintendo account with your Pokemon GO account (or, in my case, made a Nintendo account), you can just go to Settings in Pokemon GO, click Pokemon HOME and select multiple Pokemon to transfer. After you have selected them, you get a confirmation screen. You then have to open up Pokemon HOME and accept the Pokemon there before you can transfer more.

Now, there are some limits. You can’t send Shadow or Costume Pokemon over, and Purified and Lucky Pokemon turn into normal Pokemon. Pokemon with different forms like Giratina and Castform turn into their normal forms (in this case, Altered and Cloudy). And every transfer costs a certain amount of “energy”, meaning you can’t just go and transfer 100 Rayquazas all at once.

The costs are kinda weird.

Well, they are if all you want to do is transfer low level Pokemon. Normal lo level shinies aren’t bad either. Legendaries though get expensive, and you can only do a few at a time before running out of energy.

The big issue is the price to recharge energy. It costs about $1 to regain 1000 energy, or 100 coins. To fully recharge your transfer energy, it costs 1000 coins or $10. That’s a lot of money. Like, a fuckton of money. Legitimately an insane amount. That being said though, you can just, well, wait. It takes about 7 days to completely recharge after using all your energy.

I can kinda see why Niantic and/or the Pokemon Company would want to limit transfers though. In Pokemon Sword and Shield, you can only get each Legendary or Mythical Pokemon once while playing the game normally. In Pokemon GO, even if you only use free Raid Passes, you can get 7 Legendaries in a single week. And with equal or better shiny chances. Apparently the chance of a shiny Legendary in Pokemon GO is between 1/70 and 1/120 (reduced to 1/25 on raid days). In Sword and Shield, it’s 1/300, 1/100 if you have a Shiny Charm. And when it comes to normal Pokemon, well, the chances are about the same as well. It’s approximately 1 in 450 chance to get a shiny Pokemon in GO. In Sword and Shield, only a Shiny Charm will get close, with a 1/512 chance.

You can’t transfer your 100% Pokemon easily, because the Speed stat is randomized when it’s sent to HOME, but the acquisition of Legendaries in GO is so, so much easier, and all of these can be transferred to Sword and Shield.

Unfortunately though, their method of limiting transfers is STUPIDLY expensive. A time-based cooldown is one thing, but the amount of coins they are asking for is insanity.

For transferring normal Pokemon though, the costs are honestly fine.

I’m not a fan of the HOME interface though.

I don’t know why, but it feels slow and clunky. It also seems to take a while to load, and there’s an annoying tutorial bot that pops up occasionally. I also dislike the little exclamation marks everywhere, including on the news. The interface for your boxes and Pokemon themselves is fine, but everything else just feels… off. And too shiny as well. Some tasks in particular seem to take forever. I’m looking at a 5 second animation for Wonder Trade to reveal Pokemon!

There’s also a limit of only 30 Pokemon in Pokemon HOME, if you are using the free version. Which is probably more of a problem than the energy costs. If you have another game, like Pokemon Shield, you could just transfer Pokemon to there to keep Pokemon HOME empty, but that’s kinda tedious.

What I most dislike though are the models. They seem kinda weird compared to Pokemon GO’s models, despite being basically the same. Different lighting, I guess, but it all feels much darker.

FREE MELTAN BOXES!

Really though, if all you do is play Pokemon GO, then the best thing about this is a free way to get Meltan Mystery Boxes. About damn time, because, previously, the only way to get more than one Meltan was to scrounge off someone who owned Pokemon Sword or Shield.

Now though, you can get a Meltan box by transferring random crap from GO to Home. This is awesome. Finally, after so long, everyone can get a Melmetal!

To be honest, the ability to transfer to HOME is mostly secondary to the fact that Meltan is now accessible to everyone. All you have to do is transfer some random crap occasionally…