When the free-to-play battle simulator Pokémon Champions came out last week, it didn’t make the best first impression. Almost immediately, it was torn apart for bugs and seemingly baffling design decisions, something that happens with almost every new installment in the series these days. Hardcore fans took issue with the lack of options; while The Pokémon Company had pitched Champions as the new home for official competition, the game offered only a small slice of the Pokedex: out of over 1,000 Pokémon, only about 190 are in the game. On top of this, most of the items that define competitive play were missing, alongside many moves. If you were an active participant in the series’ official competitive circuit, the Pokémon Video Game Championships (VGC), it probably came as a surprise that most of your painstakingly trained critters couldn’t be used in competitive play anymore.
As for average fans, they were more or less upset that this wasn’t a new Pokémon Stadium. Champions is similar to that duo of N64 games in that it’s completely focused on battles rather than the series’ classic open-ended RPG format, but unlike Stadium, there’s no single-player mode. It’s online matches against humans or nothing. You can’t even play the normal six-versus-six duels from the main series, as the only options are the competitive standard of doubles, where you pick four out of your six Pokémon for a two-versus-two battle, or a variant on singles where you select three out of six mons for a one-versus-one battle. Oh, and there aren’t any mini-games either (sorry, fans of Clefairy Says).
Strangely enough, though, even with undeniable flaws, Pokémon Champions has a lot of appeal for a specific type of person: budding little freaks who want to get into competitive Pokémon but haven’t made the plunge yet. At this point, VGC has been running for almost 20 years, and for much of that time, putting together a competitive team was a major pain. You would have to capture the Pokémon you want for your team, make sure they had the inherent hidden stats you were looking for (Individual Values, or IVs), and then train them by fighting specific enemies to raise other hidden stats (Effort Values, or EVs). If the creature was from an older entry and you wanted them in the newest one, you’d have to go through a hilariously convoluted sequence of trades that required owning and having beaten each game in the chain. While more recent installments in the series sanded down a lot of these rough edges, letting you directly edit hidden stats and trade Pokémon to a central hub called Pokémon Home, training new guys still took quite a bit of work. Pokémon Champions removes most of these tedious steps. Instead of needing to capture your mons and level them up, you can just choose their desired stats, movesets, natures, and abilities from a menu. While knowing things like where to put your EV points would still be a barrier, the Battle Data tab is a lifesaver. It sums up trends around which Pokémon are seeing the most play and their most common configurations. There’s also a feature where you can copy another player’s team wholesale. They’re very much trying to walk players through some of the biggest pain points.
Another important olive branch for new players is that Champions’ initial format is much less imposing than the recent competitive circuit. Since there aren’t hundreds of items and 1,000 Pokémon to choose from, there’s less to memorize, and the gap between the strongest and weakest teams is much smaller. This new lineup has led to an entirely fresh meta, something that usually only happens when a major new game comes out, meaning veterans can’t just import their already dominant teams and start rolling newcomers.
This better onboarding helps newbies realize something important: Competitive Pokémon is pretty neat. Over the decades, this seemingly simplistic “RPG for babies” has built up depth and complexity, eventually becoming a nontraditional turn-based strategy game that rewards planning, knowledge, and prediction. First, there’s the team-building step, where you put together a squad that can handle a wide range of threats while potentially going for a specific strategy. For instance, many of the current best teams are built around creating weather effects like snow, sandstorms, and droughts to beef up their side.
Then there’s the tactics of playing out a match. At the start of each battle, you get a look at your opponent’s full lineup and then pick four Pokémon out of your six that you think will best counter theirs. This step is maybe the most important and heavily rewards smart prognosticating: Do you lead with your “standard opening” or go for something that will directly counter what you think the opponent will do? Once the fight begins in earnest, there are a whole bunch of permutations for how a turn can go. Which attack do you use, and who do you target? Do you switch out in a bad matchup, or go for a quick KO before that Tyranitar can Rock Slide your Charizard into the dirt? While Champions can’t take credit for the Pokémon series growing into an engaging battle of wits over the years, it makes it more accessible to enjoy this PvP fun than any official release has ever done. There have been unofficial battle simulators like Pokémon Showdown, but this being a sanctioned thing increases the game’s reach beyond those willing to scour old Smogon forum threads.
Most of the popular complaints about Champions, such as its smaller roster, have an upside, but that doesn’t excuse every problem—the biggest one being that this is basically a gacha game. While you can transfer over your existing Pokémon from other releases, if you want to catch new ones in Champions itself, you’ve got to “Recruit” them through randomized lineups that refresh each day. There is a lot of free in-game currency that makes it pretty easy to wrangle up almost every strong creature within a few days, but it would be much less exploitative if you could just, you know, buy the game, like with most other entries in the series. There are other annoyances, too, many of which boil down to monetization, like how there’s limited storage space for your Pokémon unless you sign up for a monthly subscription. Then there are the bugs (no, not Caterpie). If you return to your Switch and try to play without closing and reopening the game, you’re likely to get a connectivity error and be booted back to the main menu before you can do anything. There are typos and moves that don’t work correctly, as well as performance issues, especially on the original Switch—how this is supposed to eventually run on mobile phones is anyone’s guess.
Champions is rough around the edges. And more than that, it seems niche, likely at odds with what most fans want out of the series. At the same time, though, there are simply so many people that play these games that even a small slice is probably enough to keep this boat afloat: Champions’ first competition, the Warm Up Challenge, racked up almost a million entrants. Sometimes a game isn’t for everyone, and that is perfectly fine, especially when it’s part of the highest-grossing piece of media in existence. Is it a bit eccentric to become obsessed with the competitive intricacies of a 30-year-old series initially targeted at children? Maybe, but it’s never been easier or more rewarding to do so.
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