For almost as long as I can remember I have been obsessed with Pokémon, and obsessed is the right word. I still remember back in primary school collecting and trading Pokémon cards, and trying to make sure I owned every Shelder on the playground. As I got older the obsession only grew, with attempts to beat Pokémon FireRed with a team of Paras and lists of the best Pokémon of each type littering my laptop. What really makes this franchise special is just how many ways you can indulge your fandom based on the sort of person you are.
One little look on YouTube will lead you to find people who obsessively hunt rare shiny Pokémon, people who host silly Pokémon quizzes and of course the competitive players trying to be the very best. After a year of watching competitive content I’ve been itching to join the fight and test my skills, so Pokémon Champions came along at the right time.
For those of you not aware of Pokémon Champions, it’s essentially a new competitive game that aims to make this more hardcore side of Pokémon accessible for outsiders. It has just launched on the Switch family of consoles, with plans to bring it to mobile devices later this year. Champions will be the place all future official tournaments are held, be they in person events or online ones.
If you’ve only ever played the regular Pokémon games though you might need to know what competitive Pokémon even is. There are two formats supported on Champions currently, single and doubles. Singles allows you to choose a team of six Pokémon to take on an opponent, but only three can be brought to a one on one battle. Doubles is similar, but you bring four Pokémon and they fight in teams of two. Generally speaking there’s more strategy to the double battles, and at the time of writing it’s this mode where the official VGC tournaments take place.
As someone who has been playing Pokémon all his life, the reason I haven’t gotten into this PvP area of the franchise before is the amount of effort required to prepare for battle. Each Pokémon has so many different ways they can be less than optimal, with natures, IVs, EVs, Egg Moves, and probably other things I’m forgetting to take into account. Normally you’d have to catch specifically great Pokémon and train and/or breed them to create the perfect specimen, and that just seems like a lot of work to me. In Pokémon Champions though these are all things you can adjust at the push of a button, and it’s all very intuitive and well displayed.
There are a couple of different ways to build yourself a crack team in Pokémon Champions, depending on your setup. If you have been playing Pokémon for a while and have a bunch of your favourites in other games, you can bring them into Champions via the Pokémon Home app. These Pokémon can still be trained with the handy stat meters too, and it won’t affect their original builds on their home game. You can also recruit Pokémon in Champions itself. These Pokémon can be obtained every 22 hours, and are chosen from a selection of ten options. As standard you can only rent them for a week and aren’t allowed to mess with their stats or moves, but with a bit of virtual currency or a special ticket you can keep them and change their vital statistics forever.
Pokémon Champions is a free to play game, so it’ll cost you nothing to jump in. That being said there are quite a few limitations if you don’t spend money on memberships or starter packs, like a lack of saveable team slots and a slightly stunted box to keep your pocket warriors in. I spent my first few days with the game without any of the paid content though, and was quite easily able to afford to train up and store two full teams I was happy with from a competitive standpoint. You’ll keep earning more currencies just for playing and completing daily and weekly quests too, and the game is not afraid to hand you lots of goodies to keep you battling without spending a penny.
I spent the vast majority of my time playing doubles in Pokémon Champions, and even after hundreds of hours watching competitive play from the GOAT Wolfe Glick I wasn’t prepared for quite how much I’d need to think about each turn. Some moves target one Pokémon whereas some target both or even your ally alongside the enemies, and when any one of them could Protect or switch to a different pocket monster there’s so much to take into account. The amount of depth in Pokémon battles that outsiders won’t be prepared for is insane (and really the game could probably use some slightly better resources to explain everything) but when you find a strategy that works for you and predict exactly what your opponent does there’s simply no better feeling in the world.
Alongside all the streamlining of obtaining and training Pokémon, Champions has also made things easy for newcomers with the limited roster and hold items. With a smaller pool of critters to choose from there’s a touch less complexity in the current meta, and ditching hold items that have been staples of the competitive scene for years means decision making when team building is less stressful. This might upset the veterans a little bit, but it’s safe to assume rosters and items will shuffle about once new seasons begin.
Pokémon Champions has ensured that the competitive scene of this long-running franchise is more accessible than ever, and even allows complete newcomers to the series to play without spending a penny, cent, or other small amount of regional currency. I’ve never been more certain that I’ll continue playing a game past the review period than this one, because this deeper and more thoughtful side of my favourite gaming series of all time has me hooked. It may take some serious studying, but once you start to understand how to battle with the best of them you’ll be happier than an Adamant nature Machamp staring down a Tyranitar.
