Pokemon: Let’s Go takes a lot of design cues from Niantic’s Pokemon Go on mobile. Not least of which is the ability to analyse your Pokemon’s hidden stats and see their full potential. In Pokemon Go, your team leader is able to determine the stats of your little friends and relay that to you through vague colloquial statements. Thankfully, in Let’s Go players are able to see the exact stat potential of your Pokemon through handy graphs.
These stats are known as IVs (Individual Values) and in previous games they are normally hidden until very late in the game. In Let’s Go, however, you can unlock the ability to read your Pokemon’s IVs fairly early in the game.
Where to find Pokemon: Let's Go's IV checking Judge skill
All you need to do is make sure you’ve caught at least 30 different species of Pokemon and head on over to Route 11, out east of Vermillion City. Explore the area and keep pushing east until you come to the sleepy Snorlax which blocks your path. The Snorlax means you’ve gone too far (but it’s always worth a visit), so back up a bit to find a building with a set of stairs. You need to chat to one of Professor Oak’s assistants, who is waiting for you up there.
This helpful assistant will install the Judge function on your Pokedex, as long as you’ve got at least 30 Pokemon species logged.
After that, you’ll be able to check all of your Pokemon’s IVs with the press of a button, or a shake of a Pokeball. In your Pokemon Box, select a Pokemon and press “Check summary”, to see the normal stats screen. Nothing new here, but pressing Y or shaking the Poke Ball Plus / Joy Con will bring up a new screen and will categorise your Pokemon into one of three different qualities: ‘Ok stats’, ‘Good stats’ and ‘Amazing stats’.
You can also see a Pokemon’s full potential in the graph, which shows how much your pals can grow in each stat area. With this information you can decide which Pokemon to keep and which to send off to the great candy factory in the sky. We recommend marking your highest quality Pokemon as a favourite, so that you don’t accidentally send them to Professor Oak by mistake.
Now it’s time to start farming for high IVs! ‘Gotta catch em all’, indeed.
