Our beautiful, splashy fish son can now occasionally be found as a boss fight in Pokémon Go.
Earlier this week, Pokémon Go’s gyms were redone and revamped. One of the new additions are “raids,” which are timed events where powerful monsters take over a gym. Raids come in five different tiers of difficulty, and the higher the tier, the more players are needed to take down a monster. At the moment, only high-level players can participate in raids.
Appropriately, most raids have fearsome enemies you might expect, with high CP to boot:
Delightfully, however, some of the lower-tier raid battles can also include Magikarp, the most useless Pokémon in the entire compendium. Players are baffled—Magikarp isn’t what you’d expect in a raid battle!
Judging from discussions online, it seems that Magikarp is an easy fight; it has low CP and no attacks. Don’t skip Magikarp fights just because they’re a breeze, though: the raid rewards are good.
If you and your fellow Trainers are successful in defeating the Raid Boss, you’ll earn special items and a chance at catching the Pokémon. Special items may include Golden Razz Berries, Fast and Charged TM, and Rare Candy.
Really, Pokémon Go likes to have fun with Magikarp. Magikarp and Gyarados are the only available shinies in the whole game as of this writing. After the introduction of shinies, Pokémon Go also trolled players by making shiny Magikarp transform into Dittos after being captured.
Then again, while this could be considered a celebration of Magikarp, the fact it’s a raid means that Niantic has turned “everyone gang up on Magikarp, who can’t even do anything” into a game. Poor Magikarp.