Cook Stuart, we have a question for you: Why are you standing around on Route 5, near a Pokemon Nursery!? What on earth do you do with all of those eggs that are being stored there? Surely there is no coincidence here – he’s clearly waiting for us to leave our eggs before cooking up a lovely, Pokemon themed omelette! Well not on our watch he isn’t, let’s get him before he gets away with any more treachery!

Don’t forget to check out our full archive of Pokemon Sword & Shield trainer battles here!

Cook Stuart

Location: Route 5

We were looking forward to this battle for two reasons: Firstly, we continue on our quest to rid the Galar region of these evil doers, and secondly we’re pretty keen to see if the trainers will tease us by bringing out any new Pokemon. New routes with new trainers is our absolute favourite part of these games, so we were super eager to get going.

For our part, we did a little training in the grass near the Nursery, capturing a few new faces along the way to bolster our collection a little further.

Oh and a certain fish that we had been keeping in our party might have just decided to evolve. You’ll know when you see it.

Pokemon:

APPLIN – Grass & Dragon Type – Level 20

• Weaknesses: Dragon, Fairy, Bug, Poison, Flying and Ice Type.
• Resistances: Grass, Water, Electric and Ground Type.
• Immunity: None.
• Notes: Very high physical defence. Very weak to Ice.

Guide

Yes that’s right, our Magikarp evolved into a Gyarados! We’re not sure just how powerful the big fella will be in this generation, but it’s super nostalgic and we’re happy to see the old boy. It doesn’t exactly have a bumper crop of abilities, but it does come with a very high physical attack rating… Which isn’t ideal against an Applin with huge physical defence. Oh well.

We attempted to use Waterfall, which it turns out the Applin resisted, however it’s statistics are so weak that it didn’t seem to matter too much. It’s a good job that our Cook didn’t know any unusual tricks, otherwise we might have struggled here. As it is, we just used the raw power of our statistics to win out. As an aside, we’re super interested to find out what an evolved Applin looks like… Is that a tail poking out from behind it?

After a bit of research, Flying Type is probably the easiest weakness to take advantage of at this point, so we’ve recommended a few below, each of which you should either already have, or find it very easy to locate.

Recommended Pokemon

Rookidee – Flying Type

Location: Route 1, 2 or 3

Info: Again, Flying Type abilities will earn you a swift victory.

Oh you should have given it a berry should you? Trying to feed the Pokemon more food are you, so that they grow to be extra big and tasty!? This is disgusting behaviour Stuart, you should be ashamed of yourself!

Hand over your reward before we ship you over to Route 4 where you can dress up in a sweaty Pokemon outfit and run around all day until you collapse!

REWARDS

• £2,400