How To Get Melmetal Pokemon Go

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Nov 18, 2018, 08:00am EST |

'Pokémon GO': It's Basically Impossible To Evolve Meltan Without 'Pokémon Let's Go'

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Credit: The Pokemon Company

Poké mon GO introduces new creatures all the time, but these ones are different. Meltan and Melmetal, just introduced on Friday, are something different. They're not just newPokémon forPokémon GO, they're newPokémon period: brand-new character designs meant as a cross-promotion for Pokemon Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee, a set of new games just released for the Nintendo Switch. As far as cross-promotion goes, it's a no-brainer: a uniquePokémon tied to a newPokémon game just sort of makes sense.

And yet the idea also raises the ever-present issue of "pay-to-win" for free-to-play games. At first, it seemed like Niantic had engineered Meltan's introduction toPokémon GO carefully to avoid the appearance of gating one of its creatures behind a $60 game and a $299 console. That's the idea behind the special research it introduced on the same dayPokémon Let's Go came out: it was a new, special creature, but you could still get it if you completed a reasonably difficult quest line. Which works for Meltan, but raises a thorny issue for its evolution, Melmetal.

Meltan is one of a small group of creatures inPokémon GO that require a whopping 400 candies to evolve, which presents a problem for those withoutPokémon Let's Go. If you get the creature through Let's Go you can deploy a "mystery box" that floods your immediate area with the little guys, and after a few uses, it shouldn't be that hard to get the requisite candy, though you can only do them once a week. If you get it through the quest, however, you can only get a maximum of 11 candies through the catch and final reward tier. Which is considerably short of 400.

It would technically be possible to get those 400 candies without Let's Go, but it would take a ridiculous amount of time, requiring either hundreds of rare candies or thousands of miles walked as a buddy: Meltan takes 20km for just one candy, the highest tier that the game has. You can also trade it around to rack up a few candies, but it's a special trade and thus both limited and expensive. It will also likely be a while before anyone is willing trade the difficult-to-evolve Melmetal.

You can get the mystery box by linking to a friend's copy of Let's Go, but it's an imperfect solution: you would need to go on your localPokémon GO social media group to find a willing stranger if you don't know someone directly, and not everyone wants to do that. And you'll need to do it multiple times to get the full evolution.

There's bound to plenty of debate about how well this works forPokémon GO. A cross-promotion has a bit more incentive if you can't get the reward either way, after all, but at the same time, people are very sensitive when it comes to games that require real-money purchases for progression, and for good reason. We all know the line: "Gotta catch 'em all." In this case, it sure helps to catch them all if you have $60/$260 to spend. Granted, money has always madePokémon GO significantly easier, but a creature has never been quite so gated before.

Whatever your thoughts on the whether or not it's the right thing to do, I can't help but imagine it's going to work, and work well. I know a ton of Pokémon GO players with decent disposable income that would happily use the opportunity to pick up a Switch and try out the main game. Lord knows I've already spent the price of a Switch on this game.