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Pokémon Champions: who wants to be the very best?

Bongo

Bongo

excused from moderation duty
Staff member
(he/him)
Scheduled for release on April 8, 2026, Pokémon Champions is a free-to-play, multiplayer-only game for Switch and mobile that consists of official ranked and unranked online Pokémon battles. Pokémon can be acquired in-game as well as being transferred from Pokémon Home, and both they and your avatar can be extensively customized by expending Victory Points.

It supports mechanics from multiple generations of Pokémon games (such as, for example, Mega Evolution and Terastalization), and both single and double battles can be played. At launch, it will not support all existing Pokémon, though it is intended that more will be added over time (in particular, it is known that nearly all non-fully-evolved pokémon will be unsupported at launch, including viable ones like Porygon2). Starting later this year, all official VGC competitions will take place using Pokémon Champions, rather than a mainline Pokémon game. Battle regulations and balance adjustments can now be implemented independently of the development of other games in the series.

Based on official footage, and reports from pre-release access granted to some well-known players, the minute details of its mechanical changes are being dutifully scrutinized. The writeup on Serebii seems like it will be a good English-language resource. At the time of this writing, however, many details are still unknown, or are matters of speculation and hearsay. Fortunately, it appears that the documentation of moves and mechanics included in the game itself is highly detailed, far in excess of the information ordinarily provided in mainline games.

I consider it highly unlikely that the unofficial battle simulator website Pokémon Showdown will be affected at all by the launch of this game.

Who'll join me in playing this? I'm excited to grab a bunch of my old friends and get my ass kicked.
 
They invited some content creators / pro VGC players to HQ to take a (very curated) pre-release spin, and impressions are very positive. They're speculating IVs are gone, which doesn't kill team archetypes like Trick Room but does make them harder to use. Overall, it really seems like they're focused on making competitive play more accessible, which is necessary to make Champions viable but also just great news, even if it comes at the cost of the more arcane aspects like IVs.
 
Well, this is out.

Getting my ass kicked is what I signed up for, so it's not surprising that I'm not making much progress on the ladder with my cobbled-together team of half-baked notions. What I don't like is how often it's giving me bot matches. You can tell because it'll match you against an opponent with a Japanese name, but there won't be any communications lag nor waiting for them to make a selection, and they'll persistently sandbag by using ineffective moves or other strange tactics like Spikes in doubles.

I'm in this for the long haul, though! Note that you'll receive a lot of good battle items just from the initial tutorial, and the battle tutorials will give you generous rewards to get started with.
 
After playing Pokémon for 30 years, the idea of being such a veteran and doing "battle tutorials" sickens me.

....

Fire beats ice!?!
 
gogglebob's joke must have been Flying type, because it went right over your head
 
So does this hand out a lot of free Pokémon to get you started if you don't already have any from Home? Or uh, what's the progression like? Is it mostly just a way for people who already have Pokémon collections play each other, or is it more robust than that?
 
I watched a Nintendo Life video about this before it came out, and from what I recall the process of acquiring new Pokemon is this: You are given a random selection each day to choose from, and of those you can have one (1) Pokemon join your roster... temporarily. If you want it to stay with you longer than seven days, you need to pay in-game currency to keep it permanently.

"Seems bad!" I said out loud, and switched to another video.
 
YangusKhan said:
So does this hand out a lot of free Pokémon to get you started if you don't already have any from Home? Or uh, what's the progression like? Is it mostly just a way for people who already have Pokémon collections play each other, or is it more robust than that?
Click to expand...
The short version is: free-to-play players can put together a strong team easily, but if they have specific pokemon they want to use, they're going to have to roll for them. Home players have more control over that process since they can go to a different game and catch that pokemon at-will, and they currently have a big advantage because they spent the past several years doing exactly that, but I expect it to level out pretty quickly.

The long version is:

It gives you a full team of six usable pokemon to start with. Two more are available for free through events right now (a Dragonite for playing the game before August, and a Machamp if you use the mystery gift code CHAMP10N).

Every 22 hours, you can freely recruit one pokemon and keep it for seven days, and a pittance of VP can be spent to keep it permanently. The recruit is a choice from among a random selection of 10. There are fairly abundant coupons that you can use in order to skip the 22-hour cooldown.

Training (which effectively means customizing) a pokemon costs a small amount of VP, scaling to the amount of changes you make. There are coupons that can be spent to waive the cost, but it's efficient to save these for cases where you're doing a more substantial overhaul. Pokemon you recruit are usable immediately (they have a good moveset and full stat point allocation), but your strategy might require something else from them.

The battle tutorials give you 10,000 VP, a lot of battle items, and a variety of coupons. These can't be repeated, but daily tasks, weekly tasks, and achievements are all generous sources of more.

The Starter Pack seems like a really good value. I'm not sure about the Battle Pass or Membership upgrades.

Home users still need to spend a lot of VP on unlocking items, but because they can save big on training and recruitment, they will have a permanent advantage in the true metagame: fashion.
 
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