I Actually Like Dynamax Stuff… Mostly

With the Max Out ‘season of Galar’ season, a new gimmick has been added to Pokemon GO: Dynamax Battles. Basically, they’re like normal raids, where you fight against a larger than normal Pokemon. But this time round, the raid boss is absolutely huge and, after a little effort, YOU can become absolutely huge too.

The main difference is that Dynamax Pokemon are very tanky, you only have a team of 3 Pokemon and you do the most damage by Dynamaxing yourself. You do this by slowly filling up a bar (and occasionally swiping left or right to collect power ups) and when that bar is full, one of your Pokemon grows massive and can use a Max Attack to do lots of damage. The type of the Max Attack is based on your fast move, so a Charmander with Ember as its fast move gets Max Flare, a fire type fast move, but one with Tackle gets Max Strike, and that’s less effective against a Dynamax Bulbasaur for example.

Once you beat the boss, you get some XP and a tiny handful of items (ignore the double-your-rewards thing, it ain’t worth it). The rewards are mostly revives, berries and the odd rare candy. You then get to catch the massive Pokemon, and, once caught, it turns into a normal Pokemon. You can also leave one of your three Pokemon at the raid battle, and that Pokemon will assist other players when they do the Dynamax Battle later on. They’ll also earn candy for doing so.

There’s a new currency too, Max Particles (MP). These can be gathered from Power Spots (120 for a new power spot, 100 from an old one) and you get 300 of them for walking 2km. There’s a maximum capacity though (1000 MP) and you can only earn 800 a day (although you can go over the limit if you are strategic with your claims of walking MP). The Dynamax Battles cost different amounts: 250 MP for tier 1 and 400 MP for tier 3. You also need MP to unlock extra moves for your Dynamax Pokemon, but so far, there’s no real need to unlock Max Guard at all, and no major reason to power up Max Spirit past level 1. These move upgrades are expensive as fuck though, requiring 50 candy and 400 MP to unlock alone. But for tier 1 raids, you just need the damaging Max move, and you can get away with just the damaging move for Beldum too.

Honestly, I love the cinematics of it. It’s fun and silly. The massive Pokemon do actually feel massive, and it does feel like a boss fight, even if you are just fighting a giant sheep. The event started off with Wooloo, Skwovet and the Kanto Starters, with Beldum being released in a tier 3 raid later on, and they are being followed by the Galar starters and Falinks. For some reason. It’s also somewhat refreshing, I guess? Having something new to do, and being able to do a handful of these max battles for free a day, compared to the one free raid a day you can do for normal raids.

It’s also weirdly rather slow. Okay, sure, the tier 1 raids are easy and the Dynamax animation isn’t too bad, but the tier 3 Beldum raids take forever – not only does it take longer to dynamax your own Pokemon, but the Beldum has SO MUCH HEALTH. You need 2-3 Dynamaxes of your own Pokemon to beat a Beldum, even if other players have left Pokemon to help you.

Of course, the biggest downside is that you can’t use any of your existing Pokemon. That is very annoying. I know they want you to be able to grab more Pokemon and spend money on the new feature, but I find this particularly weird because we didn’t have to do that for Mega Pokemon. If anything, it’d make more sense to spend the Max Particles on a Pokemon to allow it to Dynamax. In Sword and Shield, you can Dynamax ANY Pokemon you bring into a den (where the MSG raids take place), and the unique features are Gigantamax, which IS restricted to certain Pokemon. It would have made more sense to lock Gigantamax behind a new mechanic, rather than forcing everyone to collect new Pokemon to beat the new raids.

Really, the whole system is very closed off from the rest of Pokemon GO, to the point that you HAVE to complete a special research to get a special Dynamax-compatible Wooloo to even DO Dynamax Battles. You have to use these special Pokemon, all the other Pokemon you’ve collected over the years are completely unusable. And, when Gigantamax comes out, I bet we’ll have to get NEW Pokemon, because our existing Dynamax Pokemon won’t be able to Gigantamax.

I can KINDA see ONE reason why they did this though: so we don’t steamroll through Dynamax Battles with our already existing, powered up Pokemon. I mean, I already had a level 49 Charizard that can Mega Evolve. If I could just give that the option to Dynamax, then I’d just be doing the Beldum raids without investing in a new Dynamax Charizard. But this theory doesn’t hold any real water, because, well, the tier 1 raids are easier than tier 1 normal raids. You can beat a tier 1 raid with your starter Dynamax Wooloo, and you can beat them EASILY just by evolving that Wooloo into a Dubwool. The tier 3 Beldum raids are harder, but once you’ve learned the dodging mechanic (and when dodges and helper Pokemon actually work), you can do those with just a Greedent with Mud Slap/Bite and some Charmeleons.

Alright, sure, where I am, where I’m soloing these raids with no assistance, I’ve had to put more resources into a couple of Charizards, but anyone living in a big city won’t have a problem… again, when they’re not bugged. Because, currently, there are quite a few bugs. The bigger ones being not getting any candy when leaving a Pokemon at a power spot, not getting credit for battles they have assisted in, being kicked out of raids and losing the Max Particles you spent to get in, and dodges flat out not working even though the game says you dodged.

Still, as its own thing? It’s a bit of fun, and it can mostly be ignored for now, since it’s a self-contained system. Even if genuinely new Pokemon *cough*Eternatus*cough* come out in Dynamax Battles, it’s not a complicated system and it shouldn’t be too hard to catch up. Might be worth waiting though, because I am pretty sure there’ll be tweaks later on to smooth things out.