Pokemon Go's New Legendary Raids Have a Game Breaking Bug

Pokemon Go has a new bug that makes it impossible to take part in the game's new Legendary Raids. You might have noticed that Pokemon Go's newest update has a ton of issues with loading image assets to the game. This causes a ton of goofy visual bugs like causing the trainer to appear invisible in the overworld map to the Pokedex not loading images properly.

While the bulk of these bugs are harmless, one side effect is blocking players from battling Raikou and the other Legendary Beasts. When the game fails to load the Legendary Pokemon's 3D asset, it causes a player's game to time out when trying to enter the Raid, in essence locking them out from participating in the raid. While this issue can affect all raids, it seems to happen most often with the new Legendary Pokemon raids.

The frustrating part is that a normal restart of the app won't necessarily fix the problem. The issue seems to be caused by an initialization issue that causes the game's gym to load up without the 3D model, which doesn't seem to correct itself via normal means.

Luckily, players have come up with a workaround for this new bug...but it requires that a player has at least seen the Legendary Pokemon for the Raid. If a player restarts Pokemon Go with the GPS off, they can force the game to re-load the image asset for the Pokemon they're trying to battle before the gym loads up. After the Pokemon's image asset loads up, players can turn their GPS back on and participate in the raid without issue.

Pokemon Go has already indicated that they're working on a fix for the game's image issues, so hopefully they can fix this before the next round of Legendary Raids start up in October...or before the Mewtwo raids begin later this month.