After being announced more than a year ago, Pokemon Champions was set to be the definitive Pokemon battling experience. With the goal to have competitive play on a single platform that could itself grow and develop over time, along with an assortment of quality of life features to make the game as easy as it could be to get into, fans were excited to jump into the game today. For many though, that excitement has already faded.

I'll cut straight to it: Pokemon Champions is an incomplete game. By design it was always going to be an incomplete game at launch, don't get me wrong. It was already known that we wouldn't have every Pokemon out of the gate or every generational gimmick. I think most people just expected more than what we got. Let me break it down for you. At the time of writing we're looking at a grand total of 187 Pokemon, with 59 Mega Evolutions mixed in there. This might not sound like a lot, but in reality I feel like the Pokemon selection is one of the better aspects of the game. Sticking to only fully evolved species for now (and Pikachu, it wouldn't be a Pokemon game without Pikachu), there's plenty to work with for those wanting to build the best, or even a team that counters the best. The Mega Evolutions on offer are similarly not the worst in terms of variety, though I do understand disappointment in not seeing more of the new Mega Evolutions from Legends ZA. Many of these still don't even have known abilities after all.

Where the game really falls short is in its item variety, and it's really hard to find justification for this. An incredible number of competitive staples are absent with no real reason or rhyme to it, resulting in an item pool that isn't all that far removed from what it looked like back in Pokemon Emerald. Seriously. There's no Heavy-Duty Boots, no Life Orb, no Loaded Dice, no Rocky Helmet, no Air Balloon, no Weakness Policy. We're even missing the Choice Band, Choice Specs, and Assault Vest. For those who maybe don't follow competitive Pokemon, it's genuinely difficult to understate just how common some of these items are. Looking at the top teams for the World Championships Masters Division last year, there isn't a single one that has more than half of their items in the game at the moment. For a good chunk of them, five out of six aren't available. It's a choke point for team building in a way that really shouldn't exist.

All of this gets a bow on top with how few options there are for battling, the whole reason the game exists. There is no way to do a 6v6 battle. There is no way to do any kind of battle other than those being used on the ranked ladder, even when setting up private matches. This means that for the Singles format you're limited to 3v3, and in the Doubles format you're limited to 4v4.

They're simple, but I do quite like the achievements. ​

As somebody who was really looking forward to this game, I am disappointed. There are some good ideas at play here. There's a mini achievement system where you get badges and titles for winning battles with every one of the available species. Training Pokemon has never been easier, and from what I've played so far, the recruitment system is simple and opens the game up to people who might not have every prior entry to the series. The game's currency also doesn't feel as tight as I was expecting, with there being a solid assortment of daily and weekly challenges to top you up, even if you don't decide to opt for the premium perks.

There's potential here for a great game, and I do feel like we'll get it in time if The Pokemon Company really do want this to be the one stop shop for competitive battling. Even with the issues I have with the game, I want to make the most of things. I had planned to get GBAtemp tournaments up and running again with Champions, and I'll follow through with that. Our first tournament of 2026 will get going next month, and be focused on the somewhat less popular 3v3 Singles format. The month delay should give people enough time to settle into the game and get a team they're happy with. We'll stick with the official "Regulation Set M-A" ruleset, though future events might see some more creative restrictions. Keep an eye on the front page in May for the sign ups.

These are the rules we'll be using for our first tournament, so get creative!​

If you're interested in tournaments going forwards, both in Pokemon and other titles, feel free to hop into the new GBAtemp Tournaments group. We've got a subforum specifically for Pokemon Champions chatter, so join in on the complaining and team building.

GBAtemp Tournaments Group

 

[Oakmontowls]

Pokemon Stadium 2 has more Pokemon,can be played single player and does not require to be always online.

And isn't free.

 

[ChronosNotashi]

Pokemon Stadium 2 has more Pokemon,can be played single player and does not require to be always online.

Yeah, but at least you don't have to pay money for Champions if you don't want to (it doesn't even require NSO). Not to mention that the NSO version (and the original N64 game without the Game Boy Pak) of Stadium 2 locks you to rental Pokemon with preset stats+moves (that can't be adjusted at all), which can make portions of the game way harder than they would be if you could use your own Pokemon. Whereas with Champions, even if you only use recruited Pokemon instead of Pokemon from HOME, you can adjust them to fit whatever team build you're aiming for.

 

[ertaboy356b]

I would just think that they removed some of the items for balancing. It's better to just adjust to the meta game instead complaining that it's not the same game as the other decades old games.

 

[MPRTwice]

"We're even missing the Choice Band"

they don't even have the choice band?

 

[Izual Urashima]

For the price of the game and its yearly pass, get yourself a solid emulation console and have fun with all the oldies you've missed. At least, you'll find a Pokémon romhack with all species, enough boxes to play with them and all the things they removed from this game, and that'll be a single game in a sea of them.

 

[MPRTwice]

For the price of the game and its yearly pass, get yourself a solid emulation console and have fun with all the oldies you've missed. At least, you'll find a Pokémon romhack with all species, enough boxes to play with them and all the things they removed from this game, and that'll be a single game in a sea of them.

My point exactly with this:

Romhack fans can do a superior job at this rate.

 

[Izual Urashima]

Romhack fans can do a superior job at this rate.

And it's already proven. Elite Redux for the competitive fans, R.O.W.E for the open-world lovers, and countless others for the general addition of late gens mechanics and pokes to Gen 3.

Plus, lots of Moemon are cute.

 

[chrisrlink]

see? this is part of why I sold my Switch 2 it's turning into a greedy shit show yes switch 1 is on the way out and yes I'm banned on my switch 1 but you know what? at least the games are on the f***img card so being banned isn't totally useless

 

[AaronUzumaki]

Pokemon Stadium 2 has more Pokemon,can be played single player and does not require to be always online.

And voice acting.

 

[Something whatever]

Just fought someone there with a team of six shiny pkmn with perfect IV, already feels like I'm playing showdown.

I won, btw

ivs dont exist in pokemon champions)

Post automatically merged: Apr 10, 2026

Rough start..The missing items and pokemon are the worst. Why did they release it like this? Yes I know it just released but still.

Post automatically merged: Apr 10, 2026

Rough start..The missing items and pokemon are the worst. Why did they release it like this? Yes I know it just released but still.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

Yet another unfinished game. Can't blame Game Freak this time, it doesn't appear they had anything to do with the development. Just kinda sad. Are items really so hard to implement? All they have to do is make an effect trigger at a certain point in a battle. That seems like the easiest thing ever to add.

"it wouldn't be a Pokemon game without Pikachu"
Highly disagree on this one. It seems like they think they need to shoehorn Pikachu into every single region and every single game these days and I'm frankly sick of it. Gen 5 didn't let you access any of the older Pokemon until after beating the elite 4 and it was one of the best in the series.

I can't complain about 59 mega evolutions, that's quite a lot IMO. But it is quite sad that the game has less Pokemon overall in it than Pokemon Stadium 2 did way back on the N64 and they still managed to squeeze full voice acting into the cart, and they let you pick and choose between the entire roster right out of the gate.

I'm not a competitive battler by any means but I just miss Pokemon Stadium and wish they would make another game like it. I have so many good memories battling against friends and family and even more so playing the minigames. Really, Pokemon Stadium is just as much party game as it is a competitive battling game (and maybe even more so) so I wasn't expecting this to be a replacement for that though.

There hasn't been a new game dedicated to battling since Pokemon Battle Revolution and I felt that kind of failed to capture the spirit of what made Pokemon Stadium so good because you only had a limited selection of teams to work with along with whatever you transferred over, instead of having nearly the entire roster of Pokemon at your fingertips. Pokemon Stadium letting you create a team from the entire roster really gave it a ton of replay value because every battle was different. At least Champions has rental Pokemon, not sure exactly how that rental system works yet, but hopefully they have a decent selection that you can choose from and they let you switch them out so that you can make different teams and not be too limited. For actually competitive battling transferring over Pokemon you have caught and trained is probably the way to go but if you just want to have fun that is a bit limiting.

 

[NitroShell]

View attachment 567130​

After being announced more than a year ago, Pokemon Champions was set to be the definitive Pokemon battling experience. With the goal to have competitive play on a single platform that could itself grow and develop over time, along with an assortment of quality of life features to make the game as easy as it could be to get into, fans were excited to jump into the game today. For many though, that excitement has already faded.

I'll cut straight to it: Pokemon Champions is an incomplete game. By design it was always going to be an incomplete game at launch, don't get me wrong. It was already known that we wouldn't have every Pokemon out of the gate or every generational gimmick. I think most people just expected more than what we got. Let me break it down for you. At the time of writing we're looking at a grand total of 187 Pokemon, with 59 Mega Evolutions mixed in there. This might not sound like a lot, but in reality I feel like the Pokemon selection is one of the better aspects of the game. Sticking to only fully evolved species for now (and Pikachu, it wouldn't be a Pokemon game without Pikachu), there's plenty to work with for those wanting to build the best, or even a team that counters the best. The Mega Evolutions on offer are similarly not the worst in terms of variety, though I do understand disappointment in not seeing more of the new Mega Evolutions from Legends ZA. Many of these still don't even have known abilities after all.

View attachment 567126View attachment 567127View attachment 567129

Where the game really falls short is in its item variety, and it's really hard to find justification for this. An incredible number of competitive staples are absent with no real reason or rhyme to it, resulting in an item pool that isn't all that far removed from what it looked like back in Pokemon Emerald. Seriously. There's no Heavy-Duty Boots, no Life Orb, no Loaded Dice, no Rocky Helmet, no Air Balloon, no Weakness Policy. We're even missing the Choice Band, Choice Specs, and Assault Vest. For those who maybe don't follow competitive Pokemon, it's genuinely difficult to understate just how common some of these items are. Looking at the top teams for the World Championships Masters Division last year, there isn't a single one that has more than half of their items in the game at the moment. For a good chunk of them, five out of six aren't available. It's a choke point for team building in a way that really shouldn't exist.

All of this gets a bow on top with how few options there are for battling, the whole reason the game exists. There is no way to do a 6v6 battle. There is no way to do any kind of battle other than those being used on the ranked ladder, even when setting up private matches. This means that for the Singles format you're limited to 3v3, and in the Doubles format you're limited to 4v4.

View attachment 567128
They're simple, but I do quite like the achievements. ​

As somebody who was really looking forward to this game, I am disappointed. There are some good ideas at play here. There's a mini achievement system where you get badges and titles for winning battles with every one of the available species. Training Pokemon has never been easier, and from what I've played so far, the recruitment system is simple and opens the game up to people who might not have every prior entry to the series. The game's currency also doesn't feel as tight as I was expecting, with there being a solid assortment of daily and weekly challenges to top you up, even if you don't decide to opt for the premium perks.

There's potential here for a great game, and I do feel like we'll get it in time if The Pokemon Company really do want this to be the one stop shop for competitive battling. Even with the issues I have with the game, I want to make the most of things. I had planned to get GBAtemp tournaments up and running again with Champions, and I'll follow through with that. Our first tournament of 2026 will get going next month, and be focused on the somewhat less popular 3v3 Singles format. The month delay should give people enough time to settle into the game and get a team they're happy with. We'll stick with the official "Regulation Set M-A" ruleset, though future events might see some more creative restrictions. Keep an eye on the front page in May for the sign ups.

View attachment 567125
These are the rules we'll be using for our first tournament, so get creative!​

If you're interested in tournaments going forwards, both in Pokemon and other titles, feel free to hop into the new GBAtemp Tournaments group. We've got a subforum specifically for Pokemon Champions chatter, so join in on the complaining and team building.

GBAtemp Tournaments Group

I knew it was gonna suck, it's Pokemon, it's recent games suck.

 

[ChronosNotashi]

Rough start..The missing items and pokemon are the worst. Why did they release it like this? Yes I know it just released but still.

Likely to make it easier for those who are new to the VGC/competitive format in the early seasons. I've seen a number of people in different places who tried to get into competitive in Sw/Sh or SV, and were put off by just how many moving parts are in the competitive scene of those games. For instance, a lot of Pokemon want either the Life Orb or a Choice Band/Specs for damage boosts (or Assault Vest for defensive power), but you can only use one of each item, so you have to figure out which Pokemon's getting those coveted items. Combined with needing specific IVs for certain team types, memorizing matchups, determining who to Dynamax/Gigantimax or Terastalize (or Mega Evolve or activate Z Move) and when...

Yeah, in those games, the end result for many new players is that either a) the player gives up after succumbing to information overload, or b) the player just copies someone else's team and strategy without understanding how or why it works, and quits after getting countered too many times. And Pokemon Showdown has a similar problem, if not worse due to the formats that allow literally everything. Not a good scenario for increasing interest in the competitive scene, much less increasing the number of people that aim for the live VGC tournaments.

Champions, as it is right now with the Pokemon/item selection, provides a unique scenario that hasn't been seen in Pokemon games in a long time: while a lot of common builds and strategies used by veterans can't be used now, it puts everyone on the same level. Players getting into competitive/VGC for the first time can have an easier time gaining team building knowledge for when things pick up, while veterans (ACTUAL veterans, not the wannabe "veterans" who are more often than not Legendary Spammers in Showdown) will adapt to restrictions like they always have (and, indeed, already are), and find some new niches that only work under the current limitations.

Post automatically merged: Apr 10, 2026

I'm not a competitive battler by any means but I just miss Pokemon Stadium and wish they would make another game like it. I have so many good memories battling against friends and family and even more so playing the minigames. Really, Pokemon Stadium is just as much party game as it is a competitive battling game (and maybe even more so) so I wasn't expecting this to be a replacement for that though.

Personally, I didn't touch the Stadium games until NSO (Gamecube was the first console my family got after I was born, so missed a couple console gens), so I wouldn't be able to share such memories. That said, Colosseum and XD: Gale of Darkness definitely carried the spirit of Stadium (namely with Colosseum Mode and XD's multiplayer), but also played much more like the mainline Pokemon games while having their own twist to the gameplay and stories (they were more mature stories before Platinum was even in the brainstorming step of development).

They probably would've still been doing games like Stadium or the Gamecube games today, if Battle Revolution on the Wii hadn't had such a poor reception. Says a lot when the Gen 5 games didn't have a 3D equivalent on Wii.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

Likely to make it easier for those who are new to the VGC/competitive format in the early seasons. I've seen a number of people in different places who tried to get into competitive in Sw/Sh or SV, and were put off by just how many moving parts are in the competitive scene of those games. For instance, a lot of Pokemon want either the Life Orb or a Choice Band/Specs, but you can only use one of each item, so you have to figure out which Pokemon's getting it. Combined with needing specific IVs for certain team types, memorizing matchups, determining who to Dynamax/Gigantimax or Terastalize (or Mega Evolve or activate Z Move) and when...

Yeah, in those games, the end result for many new players is that either a) the player gives up after succumbing to information overload, or b) the player just copies someone else's team and strategy without understanding how or why it works, and quits after getting countered too many times. And Pokemon Showdown has a similar problem, if not worse due to the formats that allow literally everything. Not a good scenario for increasing interest in the competitive scene, much less increasing the number of people that aim for the live VGC tournaments.

Champions, as it is right now with the Pokemon/item selection, provides a unique scenario that hasn't been seen in Pokemon games in a long time: while a lot of common builds and strategies used by veterans can't be used now, it puts everyone on the same level. Players getting into competitive/VGC for the first time can have an easier time gaining team building knowledge for when things pick up, while veterans (ACTUAL veterans, not the wannabe "veterans" who are more often than not Legendary Spammers in Showdown) will adapt to restrictions like they already have, and find some new niches that only work under the current limitations.

Post automatically merged: Apr 10, 2026

Personally, I didn't touch the Stadium games until NSO (Gamecube was the first console my family got after I was born, so missed a couple console gens), so I wouldn't be able to share such memories. That said, Colosseum and XD: Gale of Darkness definitely carried the spirit of Stadium while being much more like the mainline Pokemon games while having their own twist to the gameplay and stories (they were more mature stories before Platinum was even in the brainstorming step of development).

They probably would've still been doing games like Stadium or the Gamecube games today, if Battle Revolution on the Wii hadn't had such a poor reception.

I love Colosseum/XD, and they certainly have some battling elements that are similar to Stadium, but they don't have the same multiplayer elements, they're primarily meant to be single player games. Champions is entirely a multiplayer game as far as I can tell, so I am somewhat hopeful that it can offer something I've been missing since the N64.

 

[ChronosNotashi]

I love Colosseum/XD, and they certainly have some battling elements that are similar to Stadium, but they don't have the same multiplayer elements, they're primarily meant to be single player games. Champions is entirely a multiplayer game as far as I can tell, so I am somewhat hopeful that it can offer something I've been missing since the N64.

To be fair, I did edit my post to include the multiplayer functions, but I do agree they were developed to be more singleplayer experiences, with multiplayer elements being available for battling friends (Gale of Darkness even had a 1v1 Quick Battle using preset teams, for those who didn't have the GBA games or a cable). Battle Revolution was probably closer to a "Stadium 3" (didn't do a Story Mode, unlike Colosseum and Gale of Darkness), but its reception was also mixed at best since, for instance, it lacked elements from the N64 and Gamecube titles, so that didn't play out so well.

 

[Ruryk]

Likely to make it easier for those who are new to the VGC/competitive format in the early seasons.

You have a very important point in here, in my opinion. When SuMo lauched some 10 years ago, I tried to play competitively for some time. In the beginning it was ok because we where limited only to pkmn from those games. But when it opened to others, the people with the cummulative knowledge from other generations had a big advantage and the time it would take to learn to play "ok-ish", mostly related to itens use and team formation made it not too inviting for beginners. Even whough I love Pkmn Showdown, it suffers from the same problem (I know there's a ladder there, but still).

Since ZA is the last game and most people playing now are already kinda used to the megas, it makes sense to have this focus. Also, not throwing all itens at once gives people time to learn how they work competitively at a slower pace. And even though I agree with most comments about the rooster avaliable, AFAIK the ones with real competitive potential are mostly there.

For those who will try to read something I didn't write, I'm not saying is a good game, but it's an ok 6/10 until now and a nice introduction for those interested in playing pkmn competitively. Let's just hope they keep bringing in new modes, pkmn and itens with time.

 

[raxadian]

And isn't free.

Pokemon Home is not free if you want more that 30 Pokémon there.

Also pay to win is not free.

 

[ertaboy356b]

Played it around a bit, it's fine. The item is lacking but I would rather just adjust to the meta. I rarely get 1HKO due to the limited item pool but it's also a bummer that I can't use Fire Orb Milotic to take advantage of the bulk added by Marvel Scale.

 

[Ambers_Crimson_8K]

Played this morning for the first time, and it's boring!

I'm glad you can skip the cut-scenes because they are so long.

Don't really care about any of the characters, art style is same as all other games.
They try to introduce new ones, but still not interested.

Still dumbfounds me, they won't do any voice acting, tired of reading, rows and rows of text.

I won my first online battle, with only losing 1 Pokemon in the battle, but overall it's decent and nothing special, it's free, with a lot of micro-transactions.

But they aren't forced, so you can just grind, also don't like the whole regular vs. premium shop non-sense!

Just make one shop, even the non-premium items are super expensive for the most basic crap.

Game is a 2 out of 10! Mediocre but it's Free.

 

[raxadian]

So if all you care about is moving your existing Pokemon to the game, is this better or worse that Pokémon Battle Revolution?