'Pokémon: Let's Go' Let's You Assess Pokémon IVs In-Game — Here's How

The Pokedex is more robust than ever before.

Any competitive Pokémon trainer knows that IVs mean everything for raising the most powerful monsters. So how do trainers check “individual values,” the hidden stats of the Pokémon world in Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu and Eevee? Here’s what you need to know.

Pokémon: Let’s Go only just released last week, but top-tier trainers are already trying to optimize their teams. In this new generation of Pokémon games, “Judge” is a special Pokedex feature that allows players to get a generalized assessment of their Pokémon’s IV values. However, it can’t be unlocked right away, and traditional IV calculators won’t even work because there’s no way to identify a Pokémon’s nature without that same feature.

One of Professor Oak’s assistants can activate the Judge feature in your Pokedex. He’s located east of Vermillion City in Route 11 on the second floor of a building not far from where a Snorlax is resting and blocking the path. This is right around the third gym battle, but it can be done before fighting Lt. Surge.

'Pokemon, Let's Go'
Here's the Professor's assistant that players need to find.

Players need to have captured 30 unique species of Pokémon to activate Judge, which is different than the requirements for receiving a free Bulbasaur, Charmander, and Squirtle, where repeats count. Fortunately, catching that many is fairly easy to do by this point in the game. It pays to be thorough and move slowly for this very reason.

The Judge feature generalizes a Pokémon’s IVs and gives them an overall assessment of OK, Good, or Amazing. Obviously, Amazing is the one players want to look for. And because IVs are basically like the genes of a Pokémon, there’s no hope of changing them in a Pokémon you’ve caught.

'Pokemon: Let's Go'
'Pokemon: Let's Go' is a colorful gaming experience.

Mercifully, much like catching rarer Pokémon, Let’s Go has a mechanism that increases the chance of getting Pokémon with better IVs: the Combo Catch Chain.

Players will need to catch more than 31 of the same Pokémon back to back for the chance of catching a rare Pokémon with four or more max IVs, and continuing that chain can potentially increase the odds even more. That makes for a lot of time-consuming grinding and there’s no guarantee at a “perfect” IV Pokémon, but it’s better than nothing.

For the truly serious trainers out there, they’ll want to use the Judge feature to identify a Pokémon’s Nature, and then use that with a traditional IV calculator to get an even more accurate assessment about a Pokémon’s IVs.

For anyone that wants to truly be the very best, they’ll have a lot of work to do.

Pokémon: Let’s Go is currently available for Nintendo Switch.