Somewhat Warming Up To Costumed Pokemon

Costume Pokemon are here to stay. Despite communities grumbling that hatted Pokemon are a waste of space, it seems like costumed Pokemon will always be on the rise. As we’ve continued throughout the year, we have had more and more costume Pokemon, to the point that nearly every other event has SOMETHING with a costume.

But despite costume Pokemon wasting space, I do have a bit of a fondness for them.

Most if these Pokemon are kinda cute

The Pokemon chosen for most events are adorable. The most recent new hatted Pokemon is actually Hoothoot, the round owl Pokemon who can tell the time. Hoothoot wears a cute little gold hat and a golden bow. This Pokemon also debuted its shiny form for the first time. The shiny, hatted version is wonderful, as the shiny skin matches its costume.

However, not every Pokemon works well with a costume. Gengar has two costumes, but the weird, stitched up Gengar is considered better than Party Hat Gengar. Kirlia and Gardevoir on the flip side just look kinda lame with their tiny hats. Armoiured Mewtwo is also a pretty ugly costume, big and bulky and frankly just bad.

Or, in some cases, they are TOO cute, like Party Hat Wurmple. I am still searching for a shiny Party Hat Wurmple, because I love how it looks like it is head-banging to some awesome music. Other cute costumes include Floating Balloon Pikachu and Eevee with a flower on its head.

Sucks that we still can’t evolve a lot of them

Unfortunately, despite a handful of examples, most costume Pokemon can’t evolve at all. Fan favourite Squirtle with Glasses can be evolved freely, alongside flower petal Eeveelutions. Slowpoke with a 2020 hat has returned alongside its 2021 Slowbro evolution, and this year, you can evolve 2020 Slowpoke into a 2022 Slowking.

On the flip side, we have a lot that can’t evolve. The aforementioned Party Hat Wurmple will always be a Wurmple, alongside oddities like Smug Sneasel, Blitzle with a cute collar, Cubchoo with a bow and new year’s Hoothoot. They will remain unevolved forever.

Even Pikachu, the mascot, is hit by this problem. It has a LOT of costumes, but can only evolve in a handful of them. And even then, the ability to evolve is based on whether Pichu with the same costume is available.

A better way to store costumed Pokemon

While costumed Pokemon are annoying, I do think that they should be salvageable. The simple solution would be to not catch any costumed Pokemon, or only keeping one or two. But people like to collect things, and costumes can make a mess of that. After all, Pikachu has a TON of costumes, but also has both evolutions and gender to worry about if you want all of them.

A nice way to solve this would be to add a Pokemon Wardrobe, that costumes are stored in, and you can change costumes at will. However, that’s unlikely to happen, since, well, costumed Pokemon tend to bring in extra money.

They need to really stretch things out

The bigger issue though is that the number of normal Pokemon is not infinite. At some point, Pokemon GO is going to run out of Pokemon. Generation 9 of Pokemon is a long, long way off, and we’re currently floating between generations 5 and 6, with bits of generation 8 roaming around. While we’ve been getting a trickle of new Pokemon here and there, we’ve also had a large increase of costumed Pokemon. Why? Because you can add far, far more costume variants than you can extra species.

It does kinda suck, but I can see why we get more costumed Pokemon compared to new ones. That being said, honestly, the last few months have been almost nothing but costumes. Maybe it’s time to take a break…