Pokémon Champions Review

Separating competitive battling from the mainline games was overdue, and Champions does it without hedging: no region, no badges, no story, just the turn based system that has run the World Championships for two decades, with ranked and casual queues, online tournaments, cross platform play between Switch and phones, and a direct link to Pokémon HOME so a team raised in Scarlet and Violet transfers in whole. It is free, which removes the largest barrier the format has ever had, and it replaced the mainline games as the official tournament title from the May regionals onward. That is a real change to how the competitive scene works.

Everything built around that core is thin. The 186 species available at launch is a fraction of what a competitive player needs, and the Victory Points required to recruit the rest turn team building into a currency problem. Reviewers found it neither welcoming enough for a newcomer nor deep enough for anybody already playing on Pokémon Showdown, and the launch build shipped with bugs that a tournament title should not have. What is here is a good blueprint, and the tournament role guarantees years of maintenance. Judged as a release rather than a promise, it is a menu bolted to the best battle system in the genre.