April 8th is a big day for Pokémon fans, casual and competitive, with the release of Pokémon Champions, a collaboration between Gamefreak and the Pokémon Company International, which gives an official way to battle without having to buy a new game every year. Even though it’s free, is it really worth your time?
Pokémon Champion is currently only released on the Nintendo Switch 1 and 2; however, they do plan to release it on mobile as well, but for this to happen, they reduced the total number of Pokémon available to use. By only including fully evolved Pokémon (other than Pikachu) this game will be released on mobile as well since it will use less data. While mobile is nice, this is a major let-down since it will limit some competitive strategies.
The game itself looks good, being a big step up (graphically) from its competitor, Pokémon Showdown, an online fan-made Pokemon battle simulator. Unfortunately though, Pokémon Champions lacks heavily in a lot of other aspects; players are forced to make multiple microtransactions in order to fully enjoy the game, requiring players to pay in order to customize a Pokémon team. And if you want to transfer your Pokémon, you have to pay for Pokémon Home for extra storage space. If you just want to battle without buying the main Pokémon games, you have to wait to get a random loan Pokémon, making it feel more like a gacha game.
Furthermore, the game lacks significant battle strategy. When a player loads in, the only way to play is battling and major items have been left out, like the Eevolite and Choice Specs. In order to appeal to a broader audience, they disregarded their main audience by limiting many battle strategies. Furthermore, the new mega evolutions of the starters are locked behind a $10 paywall or a $70 paywall for the latest Pokémon game, giving an unfair advantage to those who are willing to pay. The stats of Pokémon are also simplified, making building Pokémon less complicated. Instead of having a proper tutorial, the game just completely removes the mechanic, a key factor in choosing your Pokémon. They also format it as a 3 vs 3 Pokémon rather than the original 6 vs 6.
How does it hold up to Pokémon Showdown? Honestly, it’s not great. Pokémon Champions offers many things like character creation, customization, updated graphics, and casual and competitive play with different mechanics like mega evolution, Z-Moves, and terastilization. However, when it comes to straight battle mechanics, Pokémon Showdown offers everything that Pokémon Champions does and properly made tiers like OU, UU, and Ubers. Other than the graphics, character customization and console availability, I would say Champions is a huge let down. If I had to choose a Pokémon game to play, I would not choose Pokémon Champions.