Pokémon Champions Has One Major Hurdle To Overcome

Pokémon Champions is being pegged as an approachable platform for those who have never gotten into competitive Pokémon battling. As a decades-long Pokémon veteran, competitive play has always eluded me. It’s not even a matter of the systems being overwhelming. I know how type matchups, stats, EVs, IVs, and all that other shit work. But my attachment to Pokémon is so fundamentally emotional in nature that, when you strip away a lot of the flavor and adventure, the core mechanics and number crunching that remain all feel a little too impersonal for my tastes. I was curious to see if Champions could do anything to alleviate that when I checked it out for a bit at PAX East this week.

So what does Champions have to offer a player like me? I’m not quite sure it has anything yet. Champions takes out a lot of the RPG complexity and team building to get you right into the turn-based action. This feels more like a platform than a game in its own right, and for those who are already heavily invested in competitive play, I can see the appeal. You can build teams from either your Pokémon Home collection, or by recruiting monsters through Champions’ internal systems that have their own in-game currency and time-gated hoops to jump through. That team-building loop is what might keep someone playing the game outside of just booting it up shortly before their next tournament, but it all feels a little clinical.

For me, Pokémon battles were always a means to an end, but I also recognize that all my sentimentality toward the series makes me an outlier. I don’t scour the lands searching for every Pokémon to fill my Dex as I journey through the world; I’m less concerned about minmaxxing stats than I am creating little mini-narratives with specific Pokémon that I catch throughout a playthrough. It’s why anyone telling me that a Pokémon I like isn’t competitively viable signals to me that we are fundamentally incompatible people. 

That’s where Champions grinds against years of my own attachment. I want to remember where I caught a Pokémon, what stage they were at when I found them, and create memories of us overcoming challenges together. Champions is Pokémon battling in its purest, rawest form, and that means that it’s all about the numbers. Watching folks who have dedicated their lives to understanding every little nuance of a complex strategy is a treat every time I do it. But I find it so hard to detach myself from the personal element that for me, the act of picking a team solely based on the members’ competitive viability would feel entirely at odds with the things I care about in this series. I have my favorites, and I want them on my team even if they’re considered “not competitively viable.”

What I’m hoping to find out when Champions launches on April 8 is that I can dig into something deeper with Pokémon that I like, rather than just ones who are at the top of tier lists and meta rankings. I’m open to that possibility, and perhaps Champions can be a stepping stone for me into unlocking a new layer of appreciation and imagined camaraderie with my favorite monsters. But after playing a few rounds of it, I’m also very open to the idea that this is just not a game for people who play Pokémon like I do, and that’s probably okay.