Pokémon Champions review for Nintendo Switch/Switch 2

Pokémon fans have been craving a battle simulation game for quite some time now. We’ve had Pokémon Stadium 1 and 2 on the Nintendo 64, Battle Revolution on the Wii, and nothing of note since. There’s the online battles featured in each game, of course, but that’s not quite the same as a game dedicated purely to battling and climbing a ranked ladder with a focus on teambuilding. Pokémon Champions aims to remedy this by being a dedicated battle game centered around the competitive scene, including 3v3 singles and 4v4 doubles as its main focus.

Champions is a free-to-start battle simulator incentivizing you to bring over your Pokémon from the Pokémon Home app to build teams, compete in ranked battles, and as they used to say, be the very best there ever was. Getting into VGC has never really been easier thanks to Pokémon Champions’ simplification of teambuilding. While you can bring your own mons into the game, there is an option to engage with what is functionally the gacha system to roll a set of Pokémon and pick one to add to your lineup permanently. When you boot the game, you’ll be given a default set of Pokémon to help you get started as well, so don’t worry about it taking a while to actually get a full team set up.

The teambuilding of Pokémon Champions is honestly an improvement over the previous methods of getting a competitively viable team up and running. The IV stats are effectively dead, leaving only EVs in their stead. You can freely assign your stat bonuses, abilities, and more all with zero effort. This will either cost you VP (Victory Points) which you can earn by taking part in battles, or you can use tickets that will cover the cost entirely of your training. It only costs 1 ticket every time you spend one, so be sure to use them when you’re making a lot of changes to your Pokémon.

As of writing, Champions contains 4 tiers of ranks you can climb. You start off in Poke Ball Tier 4 and will be climbing your way up to the beginning of the Master Ball tier. Season 1’s ranks cap at Master Ball Tier 4, so don’t be concerned if you’re not ranking up any higher once you reach the Master Ball rank. You can climb the ranks in both singles and doubles, albeit singles are only 3v3 instead of the seemingly fan-favorite 6v6. Doubles is the standard 4v4 format of the competitive VGC environment where you pick 4 Pokémon to enter battle with from your full team of 6.

Progression is a little unique in the sense there’s no real account leveling outside of the rankings. There is a battle pass that has both free and “premium” tiers, but your main progression is gonna be acquiring VP throughout your battles and using that to buy new items, cosmetics for your character, searching for and acquiring new Pokémon if you don’t bring them from Pokémon Home, and obviously ranking up in the ladder. Speaking from the perspective of a long-time fan of the franchise and attendee of the regional VGC events, I’d also consider your ability to teambuild and get better at reading your opponents part of Pokémon Champions’ progression.

The state of the game however is a little rocky from a technical standpoint. There is a Switch 2 version of the game, but it’s still at a lower resolution than expected and does not run above 30 frames per second. There’s an argument to be made that 30fps isn’t necessarily problematic, but that is entirely game dependent. Cyberpunk 2077, for instance, runs at 30 frames per second, but it’s also a much more demanding game running at a higher resolution. Pokémon should not be locked to 30 frames. The benefit of the doubt here is that Champions is slated to release on mobile devices later, but that’s for mobile devices and does not reflect the version of the game you install on a Switch 2 console. There were some unfortunate bugs at launch, but they have seemingly been on top of patching Champions to remedy these issues. The list of available Pokémon may seem small at just over 100, but considering the fact that these are all fully-evolved and does not include pre-evolutions it’s a larger list than you might think at first glance. The item options are limited for this first season, so you really have to make do with what you can currently. More options for both held items and Pokémon themselves will expand with subsequent updates.

As a whole package, it’s still early on in its life, so while it may be currently barebones, I do think that Pokémon Champions has an excellent blueprint laid out for future updates. Looking at it for what it is, a way to get new players into the competitive scene and to practice for official events, Pokémon Champions nails exactly that. It needs some work to be where it probably should be, but even as it is now it’s a respectable official battle simulator.

Note: Nintendo provided us with a Pokémon Champions Switch 2 code for review purposes.

Click Here to buy Pokémon Champions on Amazon