Pokemon Go: Can Event Pokemon Evolve?

Related: Pokemon Go: Can You Transfer Event Pokemon into Pokemon Home?

Typically when there’s an event going on in Pokemon Go, the game will have special Pokemon in outfits themed around whatever the event is. During the game’s 5th anniversary, the game had a Pikachu attached to balloons available to catch. This special Pikachu knows how to use the move Fly, something a normal Pikachu wouldn’t be able to. Can you evolve these Pokemon? Will their outfits follow to their evolutions? Keep reading for the answer.

The short version is, no, they cannot. The event Pokemon that are in costumes have no way to evolve. As a result, they don’t really serve a purpose besides looking cute and being a collector’s item since they are usually limited. They may have a shiny variant or know a special move, but that’s about it. However, they do have another value not seen upon by many.

Other Ways To Use Event Pokemon

While event Pokemon in outfits cannot evolve, they can count as candy toward evolving a version of themselves that’s not in an outfit. For example, during Halloween, you could catch a Piplup wearing a pumpkin hat. Piplup is a pretty rare Pokemon to spot in the wild in Pokemon Go unless you find a spawning place or they happen to be on rotation for specifically appearing in the wild. Therefore, an event version is just an opportunity for you to stock up on candies to evolve and train a regular one. To get their candy, all you have to do is transfer them to the professor as you would transfer any other Pokemon.

If there’s also a task where you have to transfer a certain amount of Pokemon, the event ones are the perfect filler to use to complete this without getting rid of any other valuable Pokemon you don’t want to part with. So in hindsight, you can’t evolve costumed event Pokemon, but they do have many other great uses besides that.