Five Pokemon You Should Consider To Have as a Buddy

In Pokemon GO, you rarely walk alone. There’s always a buddy Pokemon by your side as you walk around. But what is worth walking around? Here are some options.

Magikarp

You can never have too much Magikarp candy. Even if you’ve managed to complete the Evolve a Magikarp task in Mew’s special research, the fact that you need so much candy is always still there. After all, you need to power up your Gyarados as well. Gyarados isn’t the be-all and end-all of water types, but it is a very strong water type and it has a Mega Evolution, which is also excellent.

A rare Pokemon that isn’t a Legendary

There’s always a Pokemon that you need candy for, so you might as well walk that. As of writing, I’m currently walking a Salandit in order to be able to power one up. Normally Salandit only comes in 12km eggs, so walking one is actually a good idea, and a faster way of getting candy After all, eggs are mostly pure luck. Other rare Pokemon worth walking are Noibat and Larvesta, which need 400 candy to evolve.

However, Legendary Pokemon require a lot more work. Walking 20km for one candy and maybe an XL candy is rather tedious, and the only way you can speed it up is by using the odd Poffin here or there.

Wailord, Aggron and other 1km Pokemon

I mostly mention this lot for one single reason: they are great for any task that requires walking to get candy. In most special researches, there’s always a step that asks you to earn candy by walking with your buddy. It’s also a semi-common normal research task. Unless you’re like 0.5km away from getting a candy with your current buddy, the fastest way to complete these tasks is to equip something like an Aggron or a Gyarados or Wurmple, anything that only needs 1km to earn a candy. My current choice of 1km Pokemon is a shiny Lairon that I have.

Of course, you can also just walk a Magikarp. That also works.

Mega Pokemon or Pokemon who have Mega Evolved

There aren’t that many ways to earn Mega Candy. The first bit of Mega Candy always comes from some sort of Mega Raid, which, now, just about gives you enough candy for one Mega Evolution. Assuming you defeated the raid quickly enough. However, after your initial Mega Evolution on a Pokemon, you can walk any Pokemon of the same species, and you’ll learn Mega Candy for it. You don’t get a huge amount of candy, but the +15 or so Mega Candy is better than nothing. There’s no real point to walk a Beedrill though, since you get that Mega Candy by spinning gyms.

Of course, you can also just walk a Magikarp. That also works. Again.

Kyogre and Groudon

Normally I wouldn’t recommend Legendary Pokemon on this list. Walking 20km for one single candy is a lot of hard work for little reward. However, Kyogre and Groudon are a bit different. They have Primal forms that need their own supply of candy. And since they are no longer in raids and probably won’t be for a long time, walking them is the only chance to replenish your Primal energy.

You can argue that you can walk Latios and Latias, but their Mega Evolutions aren’t as good as the Primal forms of Groudon and Kyogre. Why buff one type when you can buff three?

But yeah, these two Legendaries are worth walking, assuming you’ve already made one Primal at least once…