Welcome back to Save State, where we always been living that life. In the last two weeks, Pokemon Champions released on Nintendo’s Switch and Switch 2 systems, and I’ve been grinding my way to Master Ball tier when not playing other games like Crimson Desert. Pokemon Champions is a free-to-play competitive battling experience, and apparently The Pokemon Company is looking to decouple online Pokemon play from the video games we all know and love.
Pokemon Champions is an absolute ton of fun since it’s all turn-based battling, all the time. You can pretty quickly determine when you’re playing against a new player or an experienced battler just by the kinds of actions and things players commit to, even with Mega Evolution being the only real battle gimmick at this moment. Competitive Pokemon battling in Champions comes in two flavors: Singles and Doubles. Singles play in Champions is bring six and take three, meaning you assemble a team of six Pokemon and battle your opponent with the three you think best counter what you predict your opponent will bring. Doubles matches are very similar, but they use bring six and take four formats instead. There is no six versus six battling in Champions at all, unfortunately, which could be disappointing for avid Pokemon Showdown players.
Basically, everyone knows what Pokemon battles are like: you and your opponents first choose your moves and then execute them in order of highest to lowest speed, unless priority or Trick Room enter the equation to flip speed order on its head. Due to the current meta game being relatively low power, there are a lot of strong Pokemon and items missing from this title’s starting roster. Some of the Pokemon choices are downright strange- Watchog and Simipour are readily available for battle, but Blaziken and Dondozo, the latter of whom was in the trailer for Champions, aren’t present. It’s strange.
No offense to anyone who likes Simisage, of course, but the elemental monkeys have competitive irrelevance old enough they could get a driver’s license at this point, and there is a significant chance that a nonzero number of people remembered Simisear even existed because of this paragraph. The current meta game is fun and low powered due to the restriction of Pokemon and items in the current state of Champions, which can make for some extremely interesting games, but the selection of Pokemon available seems to have been decided by darts on a board.
In any event, battling in Champions is all-online, so you’re meant to compete against other players. This isn’t like Pokemon Stadium with a wealth of single player battling and mini games. Champions is just a PvP Pokemon battling experience with the occasional bot for you to beat on if you lose a couple matches (they have to keep your confidence up after all). The good news is that Champions does have some solid information resources built directly into it for the first time. Information is power in these kinds of games, so it’s great that Champions has what is effectively built-in Pikalytics, a website commonly used by competitive team builders to figure out the best meta and anti-meta options for battling.
With just a few clicks of a button in Champions, players can view battle data that’s collected information about the most commonly used Pokemon, held items, natures, stat spreads, and even commonly used teammates for the Pokemon that cause the largest headaches. This is, as far as I’m aware, the first time this wealth of data has actually been included in-game without requiring players to reach for an outside source, and it’s incredibly nice to have a teambuilding resource like this that you can access without having to set up at a computer or grab your phone.
Pokemon Champions allows you almost completely to freely edit the stats, moves, and even abilities of your pocket monsters to best fit whatever team composition you have in mind, restricted only by the amount of in-game currency you’ve earned. By just playing, winning battles, and completing challenges, you’ll earn the game’s primary currencies: VP, teammate tickets, quick coupons, and training tickets. You can’t buy any of these with real money, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t some interesting stuff going on with Champions’ monetization.
To get one major thing out of the way: You can play Champions completely for free, which is always nice, but there are caveats to this when it comes to teambuilding due to how it leans on the actual Pokemon games and Pokemon Home.
For example, if you want to transfer in your own Pokemon from other games but don’t have an active Pokemon Home subscription, you have a hard limit of 30 critters you can transfer into this because free tier Home users only get a single box of 30 mons. “Transferring” just copies the selected creatures to Champions, so they still consume one of the 30 free slots you get in the free tier of Pokemon Home. Due to this, players who don’t send The Pokemon Company $16 a year for their Home subscription can transfer exactly 30 monsters, and that’s it.
30 copied Pokemon is enough for 5 full teams, and while it does mean you need to make your selections count it’s probably not as bad as it sounds, overall. You can also recruit Pokemon directly in Champions from a randomized list of 10 options once per day. These Pokemon can be rented for a week for free, which has the downside of not letting you edit their stat spreads or moves, or you can spend 2,500 VP or a Teammate Ticket to get them into your selection pool permanently. If you don’t like the pool of recruitable Pokemon, you can spend Quick Coupons to get another batch of 10 to pick from. Changing up a Pokemon’s moves, status, nature, or abilities also consumes a different type of ticket or an amount of VP dependent on how many changes you’re making to the creature, so I found using Training Tickets valuable when making enough changes that I’d save over 2,000 VP.
There is at this time no way to buy VP or tickets, you earn them as rewards for playing. This is a good thing. You earn 300VP for winning a battle online and earn tons of VP and tickets from completing various challenges and training sessions in-game. Each day brings a new list of daily challenges- things like dealing damage with a super effective move and stuff of that nature. Weekly challenges take a touch more time but are slightly more rewarding. Just by playing, you’ll soon have loads of VP and tickets to train your Pokemon, especially if you have already trained several of yours before sending their data into Champions!
The battle passes and membership is where things get a little wacky. The free battle pass offers VP and tickets for each tier completed, while the premium pass offers a few cosmetics and Pokemon you could just as easily transfer into Champions yourself, should you own the games from which they hail. Ten dollars to make your trainer look like the one from Legends Z-A is something, but I can’t possibly recommend the premium battle pass to people who already have Scarlet, Violet, or Legends Z-A, for example. It just doesn’t offer enough value unless you really want the cosmetic items that are seemingly recycled from existing Pokemon titles. There are plenty of battle items and other cosmetics available in the shop that you can buy with your hard-earned VP, so you can make a fabulous looking trainer without spending any actual money by just doing online battles.
The membership option is the one I find to be both too expensive for what it offers and incredibly overkill. Costing $5 a month or $50 a year, the membership lets players store up to 1,000 Pokemon and have 15 extra battle teams, plus some exclusive missions and battle music. Having the option to store 1,000 Pokemon is pretty neat, but there’s no reason you would ever need that much storage in Champions. If you actually want to spend money on Champions, grabbing the starter pack is probably the best bet overall, as it gives you a bunch of training tickets to fully customize your teams until you get them exactly how you want them.
There are a number of bugs in Pokemon Champions, though I’ve really only encountered one outside of the funny game resolution glitch. Sometimes when selecting a battle team, it selects the wrong one making whichever team is last on the list unusable. Nothing I do on my end seems to actually fix this, so I’ve resolved to just use my first four battle teams which is more than enough for me anyway- though it will be nice when this gets fixed. It’s also worth mentioning that if you’re playing Champions on a Switch 2, its resolution is blurry and low quality unless you start the game in handheld mode and then dock the system. Other than that, it’s been a pretty painless and enjoyable competitive Pokemon experience.
Overall, I’ve enjoyed my time with Pokemon Champions and my grind to Master Ball tier. It’s fun seeing new and older players enjoy experiencing competitive Pokemon, many of us trying out fun, new gimmick teams like Self Destruct Mega Starmie, swapping Mega Excadrill’s ability to a Pokemon with a one-hit knockout move, and other fun team comps. While this title is a little bit barebones now, in coming seasons there will likely be more items, more Pokemon, and more gimmicks to take advantage of as you climb the ranks. Pokemon Champions is surprisingly free-to-play friendly with several of the monetization options being unnecessary, which is always a plus.