Nintendo’s Pokémon Champions is a decent introduction to the competitive scene of Pokémon. However, due to the trade-offs to fit into the mobile gaming landscape, it’s held back from its full potential.
The Pokémon Company seems to be on a roll this year, as the series celebrates its 30th anniversary.
Already, we’ve had Pokémon Pokopia ruin our sleep schedules by building our favourite Pokémon new homes to live in (or maximum security prisons if they’re Mr. Mime). Fan hype for the new starter Pokémon coming in next year’s mainline title only continues to grow, and has overtaken Bulbapedia’s (Wikipedia for Pokémon) most-visited pages.
So, to add to their growing streak of home runs, Nintendo have released their all-new player-vs-player (PvP) focused game, Pokémon Champions.
The idea behind this one echoes previous titles like Pokémon Stadium or Pokémon Battle Revolution, where the game has next to no story and serves as the ultimate location for players to let their Pokémon duke it out against other teams. Except this time around, the game is available for free on the Nintendo Switch, and is expected to be released on mobile devices sometime later this year.
I’ve sunk too much time into the game already, bullying other players with toxic stall strategies, and have to admit, I am enjoying my time with the game, appreciating it for what it is. Although there are a few improvements I’d love to see made to the game throughout the year, which will hopefully help cement it as a legitimately viable platform for competitive Pokémon to grow.
The Core Loop
As you enter Pokémon Champions, you’ll be loaned a team of five Pokémon, with a sixth one of your choice. In this game, you don’t need to train your Pokémon up; you’ll simply recruit them from a farm via a gacha-like pull mechanic.
The plus side of this is that EV / IV training is pretty much non-existent in this game, which has been a major gatekeeper for competitive Pokémon since it began. With Champions, you can tweak these values to your heart’s content without spending weeks doing Pokémon eugenics, trying to create the perfect competitively viable Pokémon. The downside is that your pulls are entirely random, and it can be expensive to assemble a team with cohesion.
A major change to the game is how it approaches single battles, trading its six vs six setup to only allow for three Pokémon per match. Now, you’ll bring your party of six Pokémon in, and only select up to three to battle.
Duo battles remain mostly the same, so if you prefer that style of Pokémon battling, you’re pretty much golden here.
I personally got very lucky with my initial pulls, and the game does give a generous amount of currency to let you splurge initially on getting a team going.
The team that carried me out of the Poke Ball tier was a gross setup of Toxapex, Incineroar and a Mega Gardevoir. I have to admit, I had a lot of fun with this setup, as I got to draw games out and see my opponents get desperate to clutch a win, only to end up getting punished. To add insult to injury, I made my in-game character look like the most obnoxious jerk to lose to, which I think tapped into a very sadistic glee I didn’t know I had in me.
Of course, once I started matching up against the sweats who live and breathe Pokémon battles and have better, fully rounded teams ready to go, I was appropriately punished and scorned for my degenerate play style.
I think in this area, Pokémon Champions excels, as it’s a very good beginner’s introduction to its competitive scene. However, those seeking more depth from the experience will unfortunately come up short as the game is missing vital Pokémon across its many generations and held items, which open up even more strategies players love to mess around with.
An Unfortunate Backslide For the Series
While I am having fun with the game, it’s hard to ignore that the core Pokémon experience has been simplified for a beginner’s audience, removing a lot of the complexity that Pokémon players passionate about the scene come to love.
Ignoring some of the more questionable balancing decisions within the game, several Pokémon are missing and cannot be transferred over, even with the paid Pokémon Home app. In fact, fans have even been reporting that their Pokémon have entered a weird “limbo” state, as Pokémon they’ve attempted to transfer over get stuck in the transfer, and cannot be found.
The graphics can also be a bit underwhelming, with some surprising frame rate drops as well. Credit where credit is due, this is a free-to-play Pokémon game developed with mobile in mind, so it’s understandable why Nintendo and developer The Pokémon Works wouldn’t want anything too visually demanding. In saying that, we’ve gone through several years’ worth of underwhelming graphics in Pokémon games. If you mention the series poor graphics to Pokémon fans now, they’ll look back at you like that infamous still of Brenden Fraser in The Whale.
It’s also an aspect harder to defend as Pokémon is one of the most profitable gaming franchises of all time. Having the game you plan to become the home of your vibrant competitive scene running rampant with all these bugs and graphical limitations doesn’t stir confidence in its player base.
So while this is a fantastic tutorial for beginners to get into the competitive scene, I can imagine the core fanbase will be dragged kicking and screaming before they relent to it becoming the de facto PvP platform.
Accepting it For What it is
While I’m enjoying Pokémon Champions, I wouldn’t particularly say I’m “wowed” by it. To put it bluntly, it’s serviceable. Not only does it not re-invent the wheel, but it’s also replaced the previous wheels with something a tiny bit worse than what you had in your Pokémon Scarlet/Violet-themed car.
That’s not to say the game is unfixable. I think the biggest hurdle the game will face is how it plans to navigate its monetisation system (a core feature that will justify and fund its existence well into the future), while also introducing new Pokémon and items without overwhelming players over time.
I still think this is a solid blueprint, and if the Pokémon company is serious about supporting this game for the long run, then I hope with future updates to bring it up to the standards Pokémon players deserve.
Of course, the game is still finding its footing now, and deserves proper criticism to help the developers steer the ship in the right direction. But at the end of the day, it’s still (mostly) the same iconic Pokémon we’ve all come to love over the years, just more streamlined and easily accessible, and that’s still plenty worth your time playing.
Rating: 3/5 stars.
Pokémon Champions is available on the Nintendo Switch 1 and Switch 2. A mobile port will be made available sometime later in the year.
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