{"id":597732,"date":"2026-04-11T20:35:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-11T20:35:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/597732\/"},"modified":"2026-04-11T20:35:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-11T20:35:11","slug":"pokemon-champions-is-off-to-a-rough-start","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/597732\/","title":{"rendered":"Pok\u00e9mon Champions is off to a rough start"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like many live-service games before it, Pok\u00e9mon Champions\u2019 launch has been messy. The free-to-start battle sim, which is out now on the Switch and Switch 2 (and also coming to mobile later this year), is plagued with bugs<\/a>, some of which cause issues with basic battle mechanics \u2014 not great for a game that\u2019s only about battling. But bugs can be fixed, and encouragingly, some of them already have been<\/a>. Champions\u2019 bigger problem is that, in trying to be a competitive battling platform for all kinds of players, it risks satisfying none of them.<\/p>\n

Coming hot on the heels of Pokopia, a creative and cozy spinoff with no battling whatsoever<\/a>, Champions is the complete opposite. There\u2019s no real single-player story; you just get some pok\u00e9mon, you make a team, and then you battle other players. Other than the satisfaction of ranking up, battling really just gets you in-game currency that you can use to get more pok\u00e9mon and items so you can keep battling. And if you\u2019re serious about battling, Champions will soon be the game used in official in-person tournaments, including this year\u2019s World Championships.<\/p>\n

So, in other words, Champions is for the real battle sickos. I am one such sicko, and I\u2019ve been mostly enjoying Champions so far, bugs aside \u2014 battling at this level is a consistently fun and satisfying challenge, and those fundamentals haven\u2019t changed. But Champions also takes some big steps to make battling more approachable, and that\u2019s where the tension lies.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that approachability is a bad thing. Competitive Pok\u00e9mon battling has sorely needed it. The official competitive circuit for the video games, known as VGC, has a notoriously high skill ceiling and, until recently, an even higher barrier to entry: A decade ago, it took hours of grinding to acquire and train a single pok\u00e9mon for a six-pok\u00e9mon VGC team. VGC has steadily grown in the last few years, thanks in part to a drip feed of quality-of-life tweaks that have made getting and training usable pok\u00e9mon a lot quicker and easier than it used to be.<\/p>\n

Champions streamlines this process even further, and I was able to whip up my first workable team in a matter of minutes, by far the most painless team-building experience I\u2019ve had in my decade-plus in VGC. Part of that is because Champions takes previously obfuscated information, like how many stat points you\u2019ve allocated when training a pok\u00e9mon, and lays it out clearly. That\u2019s a major improvement, and it benefits veterans as much as it does newcomers.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

Fully training a pok\u00e9mon\u2019s stats and changing its moves, ability, and nature (called \u201cstat alignment\u201d in Champions) takes about two minutes and a chunk of in-game currency. A few years ago, this would\u2019ve taken me hours to do. Image: The Pok\u00e9mon Company, Nintendo<\/p>\n

But it was only that easy for me to build a team because I already had all the pok\u00e9mon I needed to begin with. I have over 2,500 pok\u00e9mon stored in Pok\u00e9mon Home, the franchise\u2019s cloud storage app, and even more in Scarlet and Legends: Z-A that I haven\u2019t yet transferred. The shiny Sylveon I caught in Scarlet three years ago was fully trained and ready to go, and all I had to do was move it to Pok\u00e9mon Home and then send it to Champions from there.<\/p>\n

If someone else wanted to copy how I trained my Sylveon, they\u2019d first need to get their own Sylveon in Champions. This part is not easy or streamlined. New players coming to Champions without years\u2019 worth of pok\u00e9mon stashed in Pok\u00e9mon Home have to rely on the game\u2019s gacha-style \u201crecruit\u201d feature, which presents you with a random lineup of pok\u00e9mon from a larger list and lets you pick one to either temporarily or permanently add to your collection. Recruiting more than once per day costs in-game currency, as does permanently recruiting a pok\u00e9mon. So on top of having to grind out battles to earn more currency, if you wanted to use Sylveon but didn\u2019t have one already, you\u2019d also have to rely on luck to get it.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not newcomer-friendly at all. Champions does attempt to make some concessions to avoid overwhelming new players, though \u2014 they just aren\u2019t necessarily helpful. The pool of held items at launch, for example, is missing a majority of the most important items in VGC, while also including items that have no practical use at all: There\u2019s no Throat Spray, an item I\u2019d usually run on Sylveon to increase its damage after using the move Hyper Voice, but the item shop does have the Oran Berry, a weak early-game healing item that no one would ever use when the superior Sitrus Berry is right there. This does nothing to help onboard new VGC players, who are now more likely to pick a worthless item that puts them at a disadvantage. And it\u2019s also frustrating for experienced players who start playing Champions with a team already in mind, only to realize that most of their favorite tools are absent.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

An Oran Berry restores 10 HP to the holder during battle\u2026 Image: The Pok\u00e9mon Company, Nintendo<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2026while a Sitrus Berry restores a quarter of the holder\u2019s max HP. That\u2019s a lot higher than just 10 HP. Image: The Pok\u00e9mon Company, Nintendo<\/p>\n

Making competitive Pok\u00e9mon more approachable is great for the health of the game and its growing community, but only if Champions can do so without alienating its core base of dedicated competitive players. Right now, the battle sim is caught between those players and brand-new ones, and it\u2019s lacking on both ends of the spectrum. But it\u2019s not doomed. It\u2019s a live-service game, after all, and it\u2019s clear that more items, pok\u00e9mon, and features are planned for the future. Champions has the bones of a game that can dramatically change the competitive scene for the better, but that all depends on how it manages to strike that balance going forward.<\/p>\n

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