Welcome to Pokemon Training 103. This is a relatively short ‘class’, but for better or worse, gaining levels for your pokemon is both a simple and often a difficult process.
Why is this? Well, it goes something like this:
Every pokemon has levels. They start at level 1 if hatched from an egg (level 5 for 3rd generation and earlier) or whatever level you caught them at, and can go as high as level 100. There are several different rates that pokemon can gain levels at, and each level costs more experience than the last level gained. This means that as your pokemon reaches higher levels, it needs increasingly more experience points to gain each level. Levels 90-100 are very prohibitively hard to get, which is often trouble for trainers who want to battle their friends at level 100.
There are essentially three different methods for gaining levels with a pokemon.
Method 1: Battling
Most of the levels any pokemon gains will probably be gained this way. When you travel through the game the first time, following the storyline, this is very easy to do- trainers are constantly in your path, and trained pokemon grant you far more experience than wild ones. Unfortunately, most trainers can only be battled once, meaning that this accelerated experience isn’t terribly available nor convenient.
That said, you can do something about this. The hold item Lucky Egg, for instance, multiplies gained experience by 1.5. Further, if your pokemon is traded to a different cartrige or owner, then it will also gain half-again the experience it would have. If a pokemon is with a different trainer and holding a Lucky Egg, it will gain 2.25 times as much experience.
Additionally, there is the item Exp. Share. Exp. Share creates a separate pool of experience points every time you battle. It works as follows: If at least one of the pokemon in your team is holding an Exp. Share, then the experience gained from knocking out a pokemon is divided in half. Then, the first half of the experience is split between all the pokemon that appeared in battle to face the knocked out ‘mon. Then the second half of the experience is divided between all the pokemon holding Exp. Share items. This means that if you ‘flash in’ a pokemon holding Exp. Share, sending it out at the beginning of battle and then switching it out for a different pokemon, it will gain 3/4 of the experience for the battle unless another ‘mon on your team is holding an Exp. Share.
Of course, the main opponents to repeatedly battle are the Elite Four. In games prior to Platinum, this is only so useful, as there are pretty much no ‘mon in the Elite Four over level 70. This means that level gain slows very drastically around the mid-to-late 80's and only gets worse. Even the level 70ish Elite Four in the second and onwards battles from Platinum, Black, and White only help so much. Fortunately, you have two other recourses.
Method 2: Daycare Center
The Daycare Center’s first and easiest purpose is to gain levels for pokemon. While I don’t know the exact number, the Daycare Center basically gives any pokemon in it a certain amount of experience for every step you take while the pokemon is there. This makes it a decently fast way to gain a pokemon some early levels. However, there are two problems with this.
First off, you have no control over which moves a pokemon learns while it’s in the Daycare Center. It will automatically learn all moves, and each new move bumps off the one on the bottom of its list of current moves. This makes the Daycare Center an especially poor method of leveling your pokemon if you have a pokemon with early moves - or moves bred onto it- that you want it to keep.
Second, it’s based on the number of steps you take and the number of experience needed for the level. So, in the end, this is actually terrible for the later (post-50) levels, even though you no longer have nearly as many worries about losing moves from your ‘mon.
Yeah, I’m not sure why I brought it up either. I actually don’t -ever- use it for this, so... yeah.
Method 3: Rare Candy
Oh, Rare Candy. How we love to hate and love you in turn. Rare Candy is an interesting little item with a ‘disadvantage’ that actually both doesn’t exist and can be crippling. What am I talking about? Well, here it goes.
Every time you feed Rare Candy to a ‘mon, that ‘mon gains a level.
Seems simple, right? Well, there are a few issues. First off, it’s just one level. Not an amount of experience, just a level. That means that if you feed a ‘mon a Rare Candy when it’s close to leveling anyway, you’ve pretty much wasted the Rare Candy. Then there’s the other issue- the one that creates the love/hate relationship.
A pokemon that gains levels through Rare Candy gains no Effort Value points. If you’ve taken Pokemon Training 102, then you recall that EV points are gained by battling against other ‘mon, and improve your pokemon’s stats. Rare Candy doesn’t give you any of those. Because of this, if you Rare Candy a pokemon to 100 without giving it enough battles, it’ll be considerably weaker (average 120-130 stat points total) than a pokemon that was trained. On the other hand, once you’ve filled up your EVs, Rare Candy is your best friend ever because battling doesn’t gain you anything in terms of numbers that Rare Candy won’t.
Of course, there’s a problem with relying on Rare Candy.
There are only about 10 in each game.
Don’t explode yet, there are two ways around this. Unfortunately, the best method is cheating. Fortunately, it’s not cheating an any way that can break the game. If you can lay hands on an Action Replay or similar game modifier, you can multiply yourself a bunch of Rare Candy and just save yourself so much time you may have to marry your little game-altering tool.
HOWEVER: You have to be aware that using your Action Replay or other game modifier to do anything that would normally be impossible in the game, or to create pokemon from scratch, will leave those impossible things and ‘fauxkemon’ marked- anytime you try to use such a ‘mon or a ‘mon modified by such a thing, it will be marked and turn into a ‘bad egg’- a pokemon egg that never hatches and prevents you from using wifi and online functions for your cartridge. Nintendo has been very, VERY nice about this though, and will not ‘bad egg’ you for duplicating Rare Candy- after all, you’re not cheating them out of anything or trying to mess with how the game works, you’re just saving yourself several thousand hours of time (and uncountable headaches).
Now, if you’re hardcore anti-cheat, or you’re worried about how that’s going to look, or you just plain can’t find an Action Replay or equivalent, you have an alternative, if slower, method available to you.
Pick Up.
Pick Up is a pokemon ability that causes the pokemon with it to pick up random items during battle as long as it wasn’t already holding something. Starting at level 21, pokemon with Pick Up will start grabbing Rare Candy occasionally, and the sweet treat becomes more common the higher the level of the pokemon.
This is somewhat of a pain because you have to get the Pick Up pokemon to fairly high levels to regularly get Rare Candy, and it’s still not guaranteed every battle (or even every three battles), but it’s a way to get your hands on enough sweets to build levels (and destroy teeth) all you like.
Finally, depending on the game in question, either the Battle Frontier, Battle Tower, or Subway will offer you the chance to buy Rare Candy- but you have to win a -lot- of battles for BP. If you weren’t doing it anyways, then it’s really not a valid tactic for you, but it bears mentioning.
I wish I had more to give you on leveling, but these are the three most useful, accessible, and above all fastest options for reaching level 100. Of course, this can be helped some by things like PokeWalkers and such, but since those aren’t nearly as available as battling, rare candy, or the Daycare Center, I’m going to leave those for you to decide on.
