Pokemon Legends Z-A Friendship explained: How to improve friendship for friendship evolutions
Everything you need to know about friendship in Pokemon Legends Z-A
Here’s everything you need to know about friendship in Pokémon Legends Z-A.
Friendship is key in Pokémon Legends Z-A for multiple evolutions, but if you’re not familiar with the system from previous games, you may find yourself struggling in Z-A.
In this guide, we’ll explain Friendship, where you can check the Friendship level of your Pokémon, and more.
Pokémon Legends Z-A Friendship Explained
Friendship level has been included in Pokémon games since Pokémon Yellow. Each Pokémon you catch in the game has a hidden number between 0 and 255, which is the ranking of your friendship with that Pokémon.
Pokémon Legends Z-A Friendship: What increases friendship?
Friendship can be increased in many ways, via items, in-game mechanics, and more.
In Pokémon Legends Z-A, the most effective way to level up the friendship of Pokémon in your party is to hang out with your team on a bench. This can be done on any bench in the game; however, it does require that you stay there for around 10 seconds for the benefits to be applied to your Pokémon.
Other things that increase your Pokémon’s friendship level include battling with that Pokémon, levelling it up, or feeding it items.
These items include Exp. Candy, Feathers, and stat items like HP Up, Protein, Iron, and Carbos.
Pokémon Legends Z-A Friendship: Can you check friendship level?
- You can check the friendship level of a Pokémon at the Café Pokémon-Amie.
You’ll find this Cafe near Quasartico Inc. and Restaurant Le Yeah. In order to unlock the NPC that will allow you to check the friendship of your Pokémon, you’ll first have to complete the side mission, Troublesome Patrons.
This is a straightforward mission that tasks you with leading a group of Trubbish down the street. Once you’ve done this, you can talk to the person at the door of the cafe, and they’ll give you a piece of dialogue based on the friendship level of your Pokémon. This will determine how close you are to being able to evolve your Pokémon with friendship-based evolution.
Dialogue data via Serebii:
| Statement | Friendship Checker Description |
| What’s this? Are you a disciplinarian? This poor Pokémon isn’t the least bit friendly toward you! | 0 |
| It almost looks like you’ve been letting it get KO’d in battles nonstop, but that can’t be right… Right? | 1-29 |
| Hmmm… I think your relationship may still take some time to build up. | 30-79 |
| Well, it’s grown somewhat friendly toward you… Yes, that’s what I’d call this. | 80-129 |
| You two are fairly friendly, but I can tell there’s still plenty of room for you to grow closer! | 130-179 |
| It looks to me like you and {Pokémon} could still become an even more wonderful team! | 180-219 |
| You really do like {Pokémon} and always keep it by your side, don’t you? | 220-254 |
| It’s incredibly friendly toward you! Being with you must make it very happy. | 255 |
Pokémon Legends Z-A Friendship: Friendship evolutions
Several popular Pokémon require high friendship in order to evolve them.
These include Riolu, which will evolve into Lucario during the day, with high enough friendship, Umbreon, which will evolve during the night with high friendship, and Espeon which will evolve during the day with high enough friendship.
The full list of Friendship Evolutions is:
- Riolu to Lucario
- Eevee to Espeon (day)
- Eevee to Umbreon (night)
- Eeevee to Sylveon (with a fairy move after level 25)
- Budew to Roselia
- Cleffa to Clefairy
- Pichu into Pikachu
- Buneary into Lopunny
