87 legendaries and the 18 rift arenas they wait in

How a rift works

A rift is a portal that opens on the map, and one opens at least every 2.5 minutes. Step into it and you leave the normal map for an arena built from a legendary's type, where that legendary is waiting. Win and you come out with ten times the usual ticket drop. Lose and you are sent back to the map with nothing at all.

That is the whole trade, and it is deliberately sharp. A rift is the fastest route to tickets in the game, and tickets cannot be bought, which means the gacha is funded by your willingness to fight a legendary with nothing but your build. In a group, everyone goes in together.

Tickets are the only currency here you cannot buy. Regular Pokémon drop tickets now and then, and bosses and rift legendaries sometimes drop ×10 tickets. There is no way to purchase them with real money, so a rift win is worth roughly ten ordinary drops.

The result is that rifts sit at the centre of the economy and the centre of the risk. A run that ignores every portal will have fewer tickets and fewer of the legendary achievements. A run that takes every portal will end early and empty-handed more often than it would like. The skill is in the timing, not in the yes or no.

The 18 arenas, one per type

There are 18 rift arenas and there is exactly one for each of the game's 18 types. The arena is not random: it comes from the type of the legendary you are about to fight, which means the arena and the fight are always about the same thing.

Reading the arena name tells you what kind of fight you are walking into, because the arena is themed to the type it represents. Electric sends you to a plant, Ice to a glacier, Steel to a fortress, Fairy to an enchanted forest. These are not cosmetic names over an identical room: the terrain inside an arena changes how the fight plays.

One arena per type means a legend with two types gives you two possible arenas. That is the single most important thing to know before you step through a portal, and it is covered in its own section below.

Terrain and weather inside an arena

The arena has its own terrain and its own weather, and the terrain is the part that changes your plan. Lava burns, ice is slippery, and water slows you down. Those three sentences cover the arena effects the game states, and each of them breaks a different habit.

• Lava that burns punishes the habit of kiting in a circle without watching the ground. If the arena's fire is doing damage on contact, the safe lane is the ground you are already on, not the ground you are running toward.
• Ice that is slippery breaks the habit of precise dodging. On slippery ground a movement input carries further than you expect, so the timing of your turns has to be earlier, not later.
• Water that slows you breaks the habit of out-running a fight. If you are slowed in the water, then the distance you had built up before entering is worth more than the distance you try to build inside.

The practical approach is to treat the arena as a different map with one known hazard, and to spend the first few seconds of the fight learning where the hazard is rather than where the legendary is. The legendary is not going anywhere, and it is easier to learn a room than to out-trade a boss you cannot see past.

Dual-type legendaries pick their arena at random

47 of the 87 legendaries have two types, and for those the arena is chosen at random from the two. It does not matter that one of the two types is clearly the better match for your build. A Water and Dragon legendary such as Palkia can put you in Sea Grotto or Dragon Sanctuary, and you will not know which until the portal closes behind you.

This is the reason a rift decision cannot be made on type advantage alone. You can prepare for a type, but you cannot prepare for a specific arena, and you cannot count on the favourable half of a dual type coming up.

Prepare for the worse half. If you are deciding whether a rift is worth taking, assume the arena is the one your build handles worst. If you can still win that one, the other one is a bonus rather than a gamble.

There is a second consequence. Because the arena is drawn from the legendary's types, the mix of types in the legendary roster decides which arenas you will actually meet. A roster that is heavy on Psychic legendaries means you will fight in Mind Temple far more often than in Hive Forest.

All 87 legendaries

The full roster, with the dex number and the types of each one. These are the 87 legendaries the game contains, and every one of them has its own achievement.

Two entries need a note. The reference page labels dex 772 as Código Cero, which is the Spanish name for the Code: Zero form of the Pokémon English players know as Genesect — dex 649 is the base form of the same species, which is why both appear in the list. The other note is that the dex numbers run past 1000, so the legendary roster is not limited to the first nine generations.

Which types you will meet most

Forty of the 87 legendaries have a single type and 47 have two. Counting every type on every legendary gives the distribution below, and it explains a lot about the rhythm of the rift content.

Psychic is more than a quarter of the roster on its own, which makes Mind Temple the arena you will meet most often. Dragon, Flying, Steel and Fairy together account for another 44 legendaries between them. At the other end, Bug has exactly one: Genesect. If you are chasing the Rift traveler achievement that asks you to win in all 18 arenas, the Hive Forest is the arena that will take the longest, because it is the rarest.

The 90 legendary achievements

The legendary category in the achievement list is the biggest block in the game, with 90 entries, and it is worth understanding how it is built before you start.

Those three are trackers. The other 87 are individual achievements, one for each legendary in the game, each asking you to defeat that specific legendary in a rift. That is why the category is worth ninety and not three: the trackers measure breadth, the individual achievements measure coverage of the roster.

• Legend hunter is the cheapest and should be the first one you finish. Ten different legendaries is ten rift wins.
• Myth tamer at thirty is a reasonable medium-term goal, and by the time you have thirty you will already have met a good spread of types.
• Legend at all 87 is the collection achievement of the game. With 47 of them being dual-type, you are going to meet the same arena for different legendaries many times over.

A win counts for three things at once. Every rift win advances the trackers, unlocks that legendary's individual achievement, and funds the gacha with ×10 tickets. There is no rift in the game that is only worth doing for one of those.

How to take a rift without ending the run

The practical routine that works is short enough to learn in one run and useful enough to keep.

1. Take the first rift early. The early game is where a legendary is beatable with a basic build, and where a loss costs you a few minutes rather than a full run.
2. Do not take a rift you are already losing. If your health is low and the wave is thick, the portal is not a shortcut out of a bad fight. It is a second fight with a boss on top of it.
3. Read the arena name as soon as you enter. You have a few seconds before the fight starts. Use them to find the terrain hazard and decide whether you want to fight near it or away from it.
4. Save the risky ones for a good build. A maxed evolved move set is worth a lot more in a rift than it is on the map, because the reward is ten times a normal drop.

And the last piece of advice is the one that sounds obvious but gets forgotten: the arena is not the only thing that changes. The legendary has its own types, its own health and its own attack pattern, and the arena just happens to match its type. Winning means handling both at once, which is why a build that is comfortable in one arena is not automatically comfortable in the next.

The good news is that the roster is wide enough that you will meet arenas you are good at and arenas you are not, repeatedly and without warning. Over 87 legendaries, the type you understand best becomes a habit, and the type you understand worst becomes a project.

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