Earlier this year I met with Pokémon Go senior vice president Ed Wu to get a sense of where Niantic’s ground-breaking mobile hit was heading, as the developer begins planning the app’s path to success over a second decade. Fans had long expected the game to eventually implement Dynamax – the mechanic that powers up Pokémon to enormous size and strength introduced in Switch games Pokémon Sword and Shield. Niantic had previously been coy about the feature’s introduction, but it’s now clear Dynamax has been on the studio’s office whiteboards for some time, given the far-reaching nature of its implementation now in Pokémon Go – which could truly be game-changing.
That said, a couple of weeks after Pokémon Go’s Dynamax features first began to go live, the mechanics still feel pretty opaque and a work-in-progress, with arguably little yet to gain from engaging with it. There’s no new Dynamax Pokédex to fill out, and no way yet of using Dynamax Pokémon outside of their own walled garden. Call it a soft launch, perhaps, or a slow introduction of a major feature to a casual player base with years of ingrained play patterns. Either way, there’s been little explanation of why Players should deviate from those play patterns to begin collecting Dynamax Pokémon or dabbling with its deeper features. I’ve found myself engaging with it more out of curiosity than anything else, with only a few clues where it’s all headed.
Here’s what we know so far. Dynamax Pokémon are a whole new version of the creatures players have been catching for years, and require you to start from scratch to once again find new, Dynamax-possible versions with perfect stats, or to obtain their rare Shiny form. In a nutshell, it’s a way for Pokémon Go to re-release every species in the game already – similar to the introduction of Shadow Pokémon – with a fresh set of mechanics and systems that feel surprisingly standalone to the rest of the game.
Dynamax Pokémon are acquired via Power Spots, new in-game locations that popped up on Pokémon Go’s map last week and act as towering pink sign-posts that Something Big has been added. (When was the last time Niantic added something so fundamentally new to its game board? Arguably, not since the introduction of raids.) Head to a Power Spot and you can battle the Dynamax creature there and acquire it, a little like raids, but with a different set of battle mechanics. You can then choose to leave a Dynamax Pokémon behind to help other players in their own battles and gather a scattering of rewards for yourself.
The Dynamax creatures you collect are, on the one hand, normal Pokémon that can be evolved, powered up, Mega Evolved and used in raids or in Go Battle League like any other. But, cruelly, their Dynamax abilities can only be used in Dynamax battles – blunting their ability to impact the game elsewhere. There’s a separate Dynamax section on their stats page, with options to spend resources on leveling up their Dynamax moves, defense and “spirit” (a stat which heals user and allied Pokémon). Leveling these up requires Max Particles (MP), an all-new resource that fuels everything to do with Dynamax and acts as something of a limit to how much you can engage with its systems each day.
You can gather a decent amount of MP from visiting Power Spots and a nominal daily amount by walking. The resource is then spent whenever you win a Max Battle, or level up a Dynamax Pokémon’s stats. Currently, only Tier 1 Max Battles are available in the game – for the classic Kanto creatures Charmander, Bulbasaur and Squirtle, as well as Gen 8 basic species Wooloo and Skwovet. These simple scraps give a taste of the Max Battle system while being easy enough for any player to tackle by themselves without difficulty – meaning it’s currently hard to judge how much powering up Dynamax Pokémon will really be required for tougher fights to come.
Max Battles begin with the first of your Dynamax Pokémon (you bring a team of three) in its vanilla form – before it then transforms mid-fight to its towering Dynamax version. It’s a cool-looking effect, and it seems like there will be a risk in tougher battles that your Pokémon will need to be upgraded to survive long enough to get to this point. For now, Tier 1 battles have the advantage of costing only a few hundred MP to battle, allowing you to fight and capture half a dozen Dynamax Pokémon each day. Tougher Max Battles – Tier 3 and, eventually, Tier 5 – will cost more MP to defeat.
You can buy extra MP from the game’s shop – and purchased amounts of course allow you to spend your way past the game’s free-to-play cap – although currently there’s little reason to do so. You can also pay an exorbitant 200 PokéCoins to double each Max Battle’s item rewards, though from a Tier 1 battle this would clearly be a waste (presumably higher tiers will offer better rewards that will be more tempting to multiply). The first Tier-3 Max Battle, for Dynamax Beldum, will arrive next week. The first Tier-5 Max Battle – which will presumably allow you to capture Legendary Dynamax Pokémon – is still yet to be scheduled.
In some ways, then, Dynamax is being rolled out similarly to raids, with the first Legendary raid battles taking some time to appear. But while Max Battles are a cousin to raids, there are some genuinely smart learnings from them here which should be praised. A tiered MP cost for Max Battles seems far more sensible than the fixed cost of raids, which requires the same priced raid pass whether tackling a Tier 1 or Tier 5 battle (the latter of which of course awards a much stronger Pokémon and far more resources ). The all-day nature of Max Battles allows players to find and tackle them at their own pace, something that seems like it’ll be useful when planning meetups to tackle higher tiers. I like that Dynamax Pokémon left to guard Max Spots can be recalled at will – a feature players have been asking to be implemented for gyms for years. I also like that Dynamax Pokémon left at a Max Spot act as a record for which players nearby have already tackled that Max Battle – as with the leaderboard-like Showcases, it’s just fun to look and see who has been playing in your area.
As for Power Spots themselves, the fact they shift in location every few days has provided a welcome opportunity to explore slightly different routes while playing. The fact they don’t canabilise existing PokéStops or Gyms is also to be commended, although the location database for them (a mix of somewhat outdated generic business data, alongside otherwise-unused entries from Niantic’s own database) isn’t as high-quality .
Dynamax is undoubtedly a better addition to Pokémon Go, but I’m still waiting to see the key reason to go interact with it. Outside of the Dynamax gameplay loop, will there be a reason to invest time and in-game resources in it? Within Dynamax’s systems, will catching and upgrading compatible creatures feel worth it? So far, it’s notable the feature isn’t being used to release any new Pokémon species into the game – something that would otherwise be a key drawn. And then there’s the Gigantamax-sized elephant in the room – the fan-favorite Mega Evolution-style upgrade to Dynamax that’s clearly on the way. (In a press briefing ahead of Dynamax going live, Niantic said it had no plans to currently add Gigantamax creatures, though in-game text already mentions them.) Here’s hoping there’s much more to come from Dynamax sooner rather than later – and we’ re not actually waiting for the game’s next decade to see this intriguing system’s real worth.
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