Pokémon Champions is off to a rough start

Like many live-service games before it, Pokémon Champions’ 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, some of which cause issues with basic battle mechanics — not great for a game that’s only about battling. But bugs can be fixed, and encouragingly, some of them already have been. Champions’ bigger problem is that, in trying to be a competitive battling platform for all kinds of players, it risks satisfying none of them.

Coming hot on the heels of Pokopia, a creative and cozy spinoff with no battling whatsoever, Champions is the complete opposite. There’s no real single-player story; you just get some pokémon, 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 pokémon and items so you can keep battling. And if you’re serious about battling, Champions will soon be the game used in official in-person tournaments, including this year’s World Championships.

So, in other words, Champions is for the real battle sickos. I am one such sicko, and I’ve been mostly enjoying Champions so far, bugs aside — battling at this level is a consistently fun and satisfying challenge, and those fundamentals haven’t changed. But Champions also takes some big steps to make battling more approachable, and that’s where the tension lies.

It’s not that approachability is a bad thing. Competitive Pokémon 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 pokémon for a six-pokémon 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 pokémon a lot quicker and easier than it used to be.

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’ve had in my decade-plus in VGC. Part of that is because Champions takes previously obfuscated information, like how many stat points you’ve allocated when training a pokémon, and lays it out clearly. That’s a major improvement, and it benefits veterans as much as it does newcomers.

But it was only that easy for me to build a team because I already had all the pokémon I needed to begin with. I have over 2,500 pokémon stored in Pokémon Home, the franchise’s cloud storage app, and even more in Scarlet and Legends: Z-A that I haven’t 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 Pokémon Home and then send it to Champions from there.

If someone else wanted to copy how I trained my Sylveon, they’d first need to get their own Sylveon in Champions. This part is not easy or streamlined. New players coming to Champions without years’ worth of pokémon stashed in Pokémon Home have to rely on the game’s gacha-style “recruit” feature, which presents you with a random lineup of pokémon 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 pokémon. So on top of having to grind out battles to earn more currency, if you wanted to use Sylveon but didn’t have one already, you’d also have to rely on luck to get it.

That’s not newcomer-friendly at all. Champions does attempt to make some concessions to avoid overwhelming new players, though — they just aren’t 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’s no Throat Spray, an item I’d 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’s 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.

Making competitive Pokémon 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’s lacking on both ends of the spectrum. But it’s not doomed. It’s a live-service game, after all, and it’s clear that more items, pokémon, 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.