Pokémon Champions

I’ve often wished for an official version of Pokémon Showdown, but it’s hard to say what a good version of that would look like in practice. No Nintendo product is ever going to incorporate Smogon’s tiering system or community banlists, for example. But those things aren’t the core of Showdown’s appeal. The reason to play Showdown is to engage with the franchise’s full suite of competitive mechanics with zero teambuilding friction, and the reason to play Champions is to do that with production values greater than static gifs and a browser interface. In fact, this is probably the best that traditional Pokémon battles have ever looked or sounded. What eventually lets it down is the lopsided balance between being a competition-enabling companion app and a standalone video game.

The emphasis here is absolutely on the official competitive format. Criticism has been directed at its limited roster of Pokémon and items at launch, but it makes sense – competitive seasons have always featured rotating restrictions, so why bother implementing features that aren’t going to be legal for several months anyway? On the other hand, official competitive format means you battle with 3 of your 6 monsters in single battles and 4 of your 6 in doubles, and if you happen to prefer a format where you get to use your entire team, then you can eat shit, apparently. If you aren’t transferring in existing Pokémon from other games, you’ll need to gradually recruit from a rotating pool of randomly-selected options. I actually liked this system at first, as it encouraged unorthodox teams and the kind of on-the-fly thinking that makes Showdown’s level-adjusted random battles my favourite format. This appreciation ended when I realized that additional Pokémon storage space and team slots were gated behind a battle pass subscription.

How much experience you’re expected to have going into Champions seems inconsistent. The introductory dialogue that praises the player for doing extremely basic tasks (apparently a requirement in modern Pokémon) is mercifully brief, while the collection of available tutorials only explores a fraction of the game’s mechanical depth. Conversely, players can be matched with bots as a mercy mechanic in the lower tiers. It’s not a terrible idea, but the bots are so obviously incompetent and not human that players are more likely to feel patronized than to have their confidence restored. There’s not much else to say about Pokémon Champions. Reviewing it is, to a degree, just reviewing the concept of competitive Pokémon, and competitive Pokémon is fun if you like turn-based RPG battle systems. I’m still not sure how someone would fruitfully get into it without existing in-depth knowledge, but Champions might make that a little easier.