Hands-on with Pokemon Champions [Preview]

The Cubones are a little bare right now

PAX East is taking place over this weekend, and while there I had the chance to jump into Pokemon Champions at Nintendo’s booth. I’m not the biggest mainline series fan, to be honest; I’ve played through the last two (SwSh & ScaVio) and the Legends games and they were okay, but it’s been the spin-offs that I’ve gravitated towards. Pokemon Unite has been a tactical joy and I can’t stop talking about Pokopia. It’s those opportunities doing wacky things with the license that fascinate me.

Pokemon Champions is most certainly not that. Instead it’s really only a third of the actual Pocket Monster experience — there’s not catching of Pokemon to fill up a PokeDex, there’s not a lengthy story to enjoy. It’s just the fights, just the battles, and that’s… fine?

The full premise of the game is to battle our teams of Pokemon against other human opponents. There are currently only one-on-one and doubles battles, but our squads run 6 deep and are made up of the Pokemon we’ve brought over from Pokemon Home or ones we’ve collected within the game. The PAX East demo has pre-made teams of 6, with mine including stalwarts Gengar and Lucario. I have to assume that there was an online component even in this demo, as a network outage issue kicked out half of the matches at Nintendo’s booth and many of the games across the show floor. At the start of my Doubles battle the connection error wheel was spinning on the game and we had to wait a solid couple opf minutes before things came back. Whoops!

The battles play out nearly like every other mainline Pokemon game: in Doubles we choose two to place on the field, plan and use our attacks or buffs or items, and swap in new fighters as the battle moves on or ours get knocked out. It’s fairly basic, functioning exactly as we imagine these battles should. But that’s it! It’s just fighting, at least here on a packed show floor. We’ll be able to bring in our favorite teams but that also doesn’t mean that they’ll be successful in a fight. I might love the Wooper I’ve had for a few generations but that kid ain’t gonna help in a fight against someone who has even a slightly decent set of Eevee evolutions. It’s going to be interesting to see if our connection to our own Pokemon survive the move over to this game or if we just opt to go for a few powerful meta sets, which I half imagine will likely take place.

Either way, the art and design of the game is pretty solid. There are a lot of great and all new animations, nice renders, and beautiful lighting. Dragonite, Volcarosa, Palafin and Raichu, alongside my own team members, all looked terrific on the screen, and the UI design apes that of Pokemon Unite, so there’s definite familiarity for fans.

It’s just going to be important to see how this game evolves as a platform. Unite and GO both took a while to finally get settled into Things To Do, and I’m assuming this game will as well. Until then, though, it’ll likely focus on the tournament and league sides of things when it launches in early April. For free, at least!