As we’ve discussed before, I have been a Pokémon fan since Pokémon Red and Blue came out many, many years ago. When I saw Pokémon Let’s Go: Pikachu! and Let’s Go: Eevee!, like many others, I was excited for the opportunity to experience the Kanto region again. At that time, I wasn’t following Pokémon anymore, so I missed the announcement of these two new Mythical Pokémon. I eventually heard about them on the Nintendo Power Podcast. They are a set of Mythical Pokémon explicitly introduced as a tie-in between Pokémon Let’s Go and Pokémon GO on mobile.
These Pokémon are Meltan and their evolved form Melmetal. The way to get Meltan is to link your Pokémon Let’s Go game for Nintendo Switch with your mobile Pokémon GO game. Now, I didn’t play much Pokémon GO but I had an account so I was able to link them pretty easily. Once connected, you will get a Mystery Box in Pokémon GO. Opening the Mystery Box will attract Meltan to your location for 30 minutes. You’ll want to catch as many as you can, and I’ll explain why.
You can transfer Meltan to Pokémon Let’s Go (and now Pokémon Sword and Shield), but there is no way to evolve it outside Pokémon GO. The only way to evolve Meltan into Melmetal is with Meltan Candy. You’ll need 400 candies to evolve one Melmetal, and you get them from sending all your extra Meltan to the professor. You can transfer Meltan and Melmetal to your Pokémon Let’s Go game by going to Safari Park in Fuschia City. And now you can transfer using Pokémon Home, which also allows you to transfer them to Pokémon Sword and Shield.
The Mystery Box is only usable once every couple of days. To activate it, you need to transfer any Pokemon from GO to your Let’s Go game. So it takes a little while to collect enough Meltan Candy for the evolution, but it is worth it. Seeing Melmetal follow you around in Let’s Go is pretty awesome since they’re so big.
And while you still cannot evolve a Meltan outside of Pokémon GO, and you’ll still have to follow the above steps if you want more than one, there is now another way to get a Melmetal without having to grind. After some updates, you can finally link Pokémon Home and Pokémon GO directly. If you transfer any Pokémon from GO to Home, you will get a Mystery Gift that contains Melmetal in Pokémon Home. Not only is this Melmetal max level, but it is a Gigantamax Melmetal. So when you’ve transferred it over to Pokémon Sword and Shield, you can Gigantamax in specific battles and use G-Max Meltdown.
Meltan and Melmetal don’t count towards Pokédex completion, but for those that want to “catch ’em all,” there are two additional Pokémon you need to catch. Thankfully these ones aren’t too hard to get.