Why Mime Jr. Won’t Evolve: It’s Missing Mimic, and Here’s Every Move Relearner Location to Fix It

Mime Jr. sits at a perfectly good level, gets fed Rare Candies, gets grinded through a Gym rematch or two, and still comes back as Mime Jr. No evolution stone flashes on the item list. No friendship counter ticks up in the background. The reason is almost always the same: your Mime Jr. doesn’t currently know Mimic, and Mimic is the entire evolution condition. Not a level threshold by itself, not held items, not time of day — just Mimic, present in the moveset, at the exact moment you level up.

That single-move gate is easy to miss because most Pokemon evolve on a level number alone, so trainers assume Mime Jr. will too. It won’t. Here’s the exact level Mime Jr. learns Mimic in every mainline game, why it’s probably not sitting in its moveset right now even if it’s well past that level, and every Move Relearner location where you can get it back without starting the grind over.

Quick Start: Get Mr. Mime in 5 Steps

If you just want the fix, skip straight to it:

1. Check Mime Jr.’s current moveset (Summary screen → Moves) — is Mimic listed?
2. If yes, level it up once (a Rare Candy works) and the evolution triggers immediately.
3. If no, find your game’s Mimic learn-level in the table below.
4. Already past that level? Head to your game’s Move Relearner (table further down) and pay the fee to re-teach Mimic.
5. Level up once more — standard Mr. Mime outside Galar, Galarian Mr. Mime if you’re playing Sword/Shield inside the Galar region.

Why Mime Jr. Won’t Evolve on Level Alone

Mime Jr. is Psychic/Fairy-type with a 310 base stat total (20 HP / 25 Attack / 45 Defense / 70 Sp. Atk / 90 Sp. Def / 60 Speed) and runs Soundproof or Filter as its standard abilities, with Technician as a hidden ability [5]. None of that matters for evolution. The trigger, confirmed on Bulbapedia’s own species page, is “level up while knowing Mimic” — full stop [1].

That makes Mime Jr. mechanically closer to Pokemon like Piloswine (needs Ancient Power known) or Wurmple’s line (personality-value locked) than to a straightforward level evolution like Cyndaquil’s climb into Quilava and Typhlosion, which fires on level number with nothing else required. It’s also a different category entirely from friendship-based evolutions — Buneary needs a friendship threshold, not a specific move, so leveling a high-friendship Buneary works regardless of its moveset. Mime Jr. checks none of that. It checks one thing: is Mimic currently equipped.

Mimic itself is a strange choice for an evolution gate, which is probably why the requirement feels so unintuitive. In battle, Mimic temporarily replaces itself with whatever move the opponent last used — at only 5 PP — and stays that way until its own user switches out, at which point it reverts back to Mimic. It’s flavor-accurate — Mime Jr.’s own Pokedex entry describes it watching a skilled dancer and copying the performance move for move [18] — but it’s mechanically weak, which is exactly why it gets pruned from movesets so easily. Nothing else in Mime Jr.’s kit references copying or performance the way Mimic does, so the evolution condition isn’t arbitrary. It’s just attached to a move nobody keeps around on merit.

Find Your Game: Exact Mimic Level by Generation

This is the number almost every guide gets wrong, because it changes dramatically across games — and older summaries frequently misquote one generation’s figure for another. Cross-checked against Bulbapedia’s dedicated per-generation learnsets and Pokemon Database independently for each entry below [2][4][6][7][8][9][15][16][17]:

Verified against current source data as of Pokemon Legends: Z-A’s 2026 release. Values may shift with future patches — always cross-check in-game before assuming a figure from an older guide still applies.

The Overwritten-Move Trap

Here’s the part almost no guide explains, and it’s the actual reason most trainers get stuck: reaching the learn-level isn’t enough if Mimic never survives to that point. Every Pokemon can only hold four moves at once. If Mime Jr. already knows four moves when it hits the Mimic learn-level, the game prompts you to either skip the new move or overwrite one of the existing four — and Mimic itself can just as easily be the move that gets bumped out later, the next time a new move wants a slot.

This is especially common in Sword/Shield and Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl, where Mimic doesn’t arrive until level 32 — by then a Mime Jr. leveled up normally through wild battles or Exp. Share has typically cycled through 6–8 learnable moves, several past the four-slot cap. Unless you deliberately declined every later move-learn prompt, Mimic is very likely gone by the time you check. The fix isn’t re-leveling from scratch. It’s the Move Relearner.

Play it out on a Sword/Shield Mime Jr. caught at level 5: it likely already knows Pound and Copycat from birth, picks up Baton Pass at 4, Encore at 8, Confusion at 12, and Role Play at 16 — that’s five moves competing for four slots before level 20, meaning at least one earlier move already got silently dropped or auto-selected against by the player. By the time Mimic itself arrives at level 32, the moveset has cycled through Protect (20), Recycle (24), and Psybeam (28) on top of that. Unless every single prompt along the way was answered with “don’t learn,” Mimic slots in only to be evicted again a few levels later by Light Screen, Reflect, or Safeguard. That’s the trap in a nutshell: the level number is real, but survival to your next level-up is the part that actually fails.

How to Get Mimic Back: Move Relearner Locations by Game

Every mainline game (except current-gen Sword/Shield, which made it free) gates this behind a Heart Scale, an item usually farmed from Digger fossils, Feebas trades, or wandering NPCs who hand them out for shaking grass/rustling patches. Locations confirmed directly from Bulbapedia’s Move Relearner reference [3], cross-checked against Game8’s BDSP walkthrough for the Sinnoh entry [12]:

If you’re in Legends: Arceus, there’s no Move Relearner at all — catching a fresh Mime Jr. below level 25 and leveling it up naturally is the only path, since it can’t be bred. Legends: Z-A skips the problem entirely: Mimic is buyable outright as TM125, so a moveset mistake never blocks the evolution [13].

The Galar Branch: Why Your Mime Jr Might Turn Into an Ice-Type

Region matters as much as the move. Level up a Mime Jr. that knows Mimic while you’re physically in the Galar region and it evolves into Galarian Mr. Mime — Ice/Psychic instead of the standard Psychic/Fairy, with Vital Spirit and Screen Cleaner as its abilities and Ice Body hidden, versus the original’s Soundproof/Filter/Technician (per Pokemon Database’s side-by-side form comparison [10]). Trigger the same evolution anywhere else and you get the standard form.

Legends: Z-A is the one confirmed exception worth flagging, because it breaks the pattern trainers expect from the Galar rule: even though Z-A is a Kalos-region game, you might assume evolving there defaults to standard Mr. Mime the way it would in any non-Galar location. That’s correct — but there’s no route around it. Game8’s dedicated Z-A guide confirms Mime Jr. cannot evolve into Galarian Mr. Mime in that game at all; the only way to add a Galarian Mr. Mime to a Z-A Living Dex is to catch one directly as a wild Pokemon in the Hyperspace Wild Zones [13]. If you’re chasing the regional variant specifically, evolving is the wrong strategy there — go catch it instead.

Mr. Rime: The Second Evolution (Galarian Branch Only)

Only the Galarian line continues. Galarian Mr. Mime evolves into Mr. Rime at level 42, no move or item condition attached — a plain level-up evolution, confirmed identically on both Bulbapedia and Pokemon Database [1][10]. Standard Mr. Mime has no further evolution in any game; once you’ve got the Psychic/Fairy form, that’s the final stage.

What Kind of Trainer Are You?

The “right” way to handle this evolution depends heavily on why you’re doing it:

FAQ

Does Mime Jr. need high friendship to evolve, like Buneary or Golbat?

No, and this is the single most common mix-up with this evolution. Mime Jr. has no friendship condition anywhere in its evolution data — the confusion likely comes from it being a “baby” Pokemon alongside genuinely friendship-gated species. If you’re grinding Vitamins or petting your Mime Jr. hoping to raise a hidden counter, that effort is being wasted; only Mimic and a level-up matter.

Can I just buy or breed my way past the level requirement?

Only in Legends: Z-A, where TM125 teaches Mimic directly with no level check at all. Every other mainline game requires either reaching the natural learn-level or visiting the Move Relearner — there’s no TM for Mimic anywhere else, and Mime Jr. can’t pass Mimic down through breeding since it sits in the Undiscovered egg group.

Is it worth keeping Mimic on Mr. Mime after it evolves?

Generally no. Mimic temporarily copies whatever move the opponent last used, at a thin 10 PP, and it’s rarely a stronger option than a dedicated coverage move Mr. Mime already learns naturally. Its entire job is being present at the moment of evolution — once that’s done, replacing it costs nothing and usually improves the moveset.

My Mime Jr. knows Mimic and I leveled it up, but it still didn’t evolve. What’s wrong?

Check its held item before anything else. An Everstone blocks every level-up evolution in the series, Mime Jr. included, and it’s an easy item to forget about if you inherited or traded for the Pokemon. If there’s no Everstone involved, double-check you actually gained a level rather than just gaining Exp. Points that didn’t cross the threshold — a Rare Candy guarantees a real level gain and is the fastest way to rule that out entirely.

Standard Mr. Mime or Galarian Mr. Mime — which is actually better?

Depends on what you’re building. Standard Mr. Mime’s 120 base Sp. Def and Fairy typing make it a sturdier special wall with a full immunity to Dragon-type attacks and a resistance to Dark-type pressure. Galarian Mr. Mime trades that for 100 base Speed and a physically tougher spread, at the cost of a genuinely rough Ice/Psychic defensive typing — weak to Fire, Rock, Steel, Bug, Ghost, and Dark all at once, with Fighting damage the one weakness Psychic’s own resistance cancels back to neutral [20][21] (recomputed by hand from Ice’s and Psychic’s separate single-type charts, not taken from a pre-merged summary). If you already have a Fairy-type answering Dragons, Galarian’s speed tier is the more useful pickup; if not, standard’s typing does more defensive work on its own.

The Short Version

Mime Jr. isn’t stuck, broken, or waiting on a hidden counter — it’s one move away from evolving, and that move is almost certainly not in its current four slots. Confirm Mimic is equipped, check the level table above for your specific game, and if you’re past that level already, the Move Relearner (or TM125 in Legends: Z-A) gets you there without a single wasted level. The only decision left is where you level it up: anywhere for standard Mr. Mime, inside Galar specifically if you want the Ice/Psychic branch that eventually becomes Mr. Rime.

Sources

• Bulbapedia — Mime Jr. (Pokemon)
• Bulbapedia — Mimic (move), per-generation learnset data
• Bulbapedia — Move Relearner (per-generation NPC locations and costs)
• Bulbapedia — Mime Jr. Generation VII learnset subpage
• Pokemon Database — Mime Jr. Pokedex
• Pokemon Database — Mime Jr. Generation 4, 7, 8, and 9 move learnsets
• Pokemon Database — Mr. Mime Pokedex (both forms)
• Pokemon Database — Pokemon not available in Scarlet & Violet
• Game8 — Mime Jr. guides for Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl, Legends: Z-A, and Legends: Arceus
• Serebii — Mimic AttackDex entry
• Pokemon.com — Official Mime Jr. Pokedex entry
• Pokemon Database — Ice and Psychic type defensive charts

Michael R.

I've been playing video games for over 20 years, spanning everything from early PC titles to modern open-world games. I started Switchblade Gaming to publish the kind of accurate, well-researched guides I always wanted to find — built on primary sources, tested in-game, and kept up to date after patches. I currently focus on Minecraft and Pokémon GO.