Pokémon Champions should have been an easy victory. Take the competitive battling of your average Pokémon RPG and section it off into its own game, just like the Stadiums and Coliseums of yesterday. But judging by the free-to-play game’s early fan reception, that mission is far more complicated than it sounds. The Pokémon community is divided over absent monsters, lost items, and missing features. Depending on who you are, Champions is either a slap in the face to long-time players, a much-needed introduction to newcomers, or business as usual for the series’ competitive scene.
You could write that messy debate off as your typical community tension that haunts almost every Pokémon game these days, but doing so would be letting Champions off too easily. The confusion over what the battling game is trying to do and who it’s for stems from a messy launch clouded by mixed messaging. In trying to make a game for both newcomers and series’ veterans alike, The Pokémon Company has delivered a non-committal competitive experience that players are right to feel ambivalent about.
Even before its launch this week, it was hard to get a handle on the exact audience for Pokémon Champions. On one hand, it felt laser-targeted towards the series’ most dedicated players. News that Champions was to become the standard platform for the Pokémon Video Game Championships (VGC) seemed to signal that the game would move the hardcore players with teams of painstakingly tweaked monsters to their own dedicated app. That was great news for casual players, as it raised some hope that online matches in the mainline RPGs could be freed from strict metas.
The Pokémon Company had a different idea in mind, though. In an interview with VGC, director Masaaki Hoshino stressed that the goal was to make battling more newcomer-friendly with Champions rather than create a VIP section for the top players: “With this game, I hope to expand that accessibility to make it something that anyone can jump in and enjoy.” It’s a noble idea, but one that carries some clear tension. If your most competitive audience is going to fully migrate to one new game, won’t new players find themselves in the deep end quickly?
Now that Pokémon Champions is out, we have a better sense of how the developers behind it hoped to account for that dynamic. The game goes to great lengths to demystify high-level battling and streamline it to the point that everyone is on a level playing field. The arduous process of breeding and EV-training has been replaced by one “training” interface. That simply lets you dial up your monster’s stats, moves, nature, and ability and spend some currency to spit out a battle-ready fighter that would usually take hours of Ditto breeding and egg hatching to achieve. It’s like ordering a burger off a menu: I’ll take an adamant Machamp with Guts and extra attack, hold the HP!
It’s not just about making it easier to assemble a team, but making competitive play less overwhelming too. You no longer have to research what monsters are viable in the series’ 1,000+ roster. Instead, the launch version of the game includes just 186 monsters that can be used in battle, most of which already have some level of viability on the competitive circuit. Similarly, Champions contains a very lean selection of held items currently, an important piece of team-building. You can give your monsters a variety of berries or type-boosting boosters, but more niche items like Light Clay and Assault Vest are nowhere to be found at launch.
It’s these decisions that have the community at war with itself. For those who expected to port their existing team to the platform that official tournaments will use going forward, it’s a troubling change. Entire strategies have been made moot for the time being, forcing players to work with the limited set of tools they’ve been given. Even if every item and monster will come to the game eventually through gradual updates, professional players will have a little over a month to figure that out before competing at this year’s Pokémon Regional Championships in Indianapolis. It’s a bit like the NFL telling the coaches of every team that their rosters have been disbanded and they need to rebuild a team right before the season starts.
Granted, that’s not really all that different from how Pokémon’s competitive scene usually works. Players are used to ruleset rotations that change what monsters are eligible. Champions could be seen as an extension of that, baked into a live-service game. There’s a good reason to believe that missing monsters and items will cycle into the game seasonally, making sure that the meta never gets stale — though it’s just as likely that drip-feeding those things will be more a matter of engineering live-service player retention.
Whichever way that goes, some players still see the changes as a necessary step to convert more casual fans into serious contenders. Less monsters and items mean that curious players don’t have to memorize an encyclopedia to hold their own in battle. That’s the tough part of online play when you’re starting out. Your opponent’s monsters can feel invincible, built to counter anything you throw at them. A held item you’ve never heard of might turn an attack you should be able to survive into a one-hit KO. In theory, Champions could soften that feeling since you’ll only need to get familiar with a manageable assortment of team builds.
As friendly as these considerations might be to newcomers, they still can’t hope to destroy the biggest barrier to competitive play: the players themselves. Pokémon’s most competitive fighters have broken the series down to a subatomic level, running math equations to figure out the most powerful team comps. You can already see those minds at work mere days into Champions’ life, as they’ve already figured out how to build an unstoppable Mega Hawlucha. If you’re a new player that doesn’t hang out in subreddits where players have worked to figure out a reliable counter, you’re bound to lose a lot. You can’t stop a meta from forming in Pokémon; you can only delay it by a few days.
Can something like Champions ever be a good way to meld these two classes of players into one stadium? The truth is that all of the streamlining in the world can’t put every player on even footing without uprooting Pokémon as we know it and rebuilding it from scratch. The veterans are always going to have a built-in advantage in the form of resources that exist outside the game. And frankly, that’s not exactly unfair. That level of investment is what separates a serious player from someone who dabbles online for fun. I don’t jump into a few games of intramural flag football and expect that I’ll be able to hold my own in the NFL. I want to watch the pros play because of their tireless research and training; the discipline is what makes top-level play a fun spectator sport. But watching players compete with a perfect team they created with a few button presses and some in-game currency? I’m not as impressed.
In its earliest form, Pokémon Champions struggles to find the right middle ground. The haters and defenders both have valid points. It’s less overwhelming at the expense of wide strategy, yet still vulnerable to the same skill gap, even with those changes. The difference is that now you can pay for a battle pass and monthly subscription rather than buying one premium game once every four years. It feels less about welcoming in a new audience and more about building a new revenue stream.
I wish there was a better solution, because I would also love to see a game that acts as a welcoming introduction to the VGC. If only there were a game where newcomers could learn about a variety of monsters by fighting against them, get increasingly complex moves taught to them at a gradual pace, obtain useful held items one by one, and work their way up from simple battles to more serious challenges before having to step into an online arena with humans… Oh, right.
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