Pokemon Champions is off to a rough start – here’s why

If you’re a dedicated Pokemon fan, you probably know the drill by now: whenever a new Pokemon game releases, there’s always a whole bunch of negativity that pops up around it. A good chunk of it is justified, but sometimes people take that negativity a bit too far. So when I played Pokemon Champions for the first time last night, I went in as optimistically as possible – after all, this game is the future of competitive Pokemon, and the one official VGC tournaments will use from here on out.

Four hours later, and I can’t help but be massively disappointed with this product. That being said, at the time of writing, Pokemon Champions hasn’t even existed for a full day – is it really that bad? Technically, this is passable in terms of gameplay and mechanics – it’s everything else that truly disappoints. Here are all of the things I hope to see Pokemon Champions improve in future updates, even though those are probably at least a month or two away, if I had to guess.

The positives

To be fully honest, Pokemon Champions has a lot of negatives, and I don’t just want to complain for seven paragraphs, so let’s start with the positives first, because they do exist. First up, and perhaps most importantly, is that getting Pokemon battle-ready is in fact easier than ever. You can edit all of your Pokemon’s stats, moves, and properties from one easy-to-understand screen, and you don’t have to do any actual EV training or IV breeding, as IVs no longer exist. Furthermore, there are plenty of customization options available for your trainer, including victory poses, throwing styles, and tons of outfits – and there will presumably only be more of each one as time goes on. Finally, the starter pack bonuses are actually really good – normally, training a Pokemon requires VP, which winds up in relatively short supply, and the starter pack gives you 50 Training Tickets. You can use 1 Training Ticket to make as many changes to a single Pokemon as you want, making them much more useful than VP in this case.

I also appreciate that you can transfer Pokemon in from Pokemon Home rather than being forced to use the in-game recruitment system. I’ve pretty much exclusively stuck to using Home to transfer Pokemon, though I’ve heard some have had problems with their Pokemon glitching out and being stuck in limbo – nothing like that has happened for me yet, but it might be a good idea to exercise a bit of caution just in case. The move animations also appear to be an improvement over previous main series games. They’re still not perfect, of course, and multi-hit moves like Bullet Seed are still as awkward as ever, but the developers were smart and realized people are going to see these move animations a lot in tournaments and such, and so they needed to be improved. Finally, the gameplay is mostly functional – that’s an improvement over Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, which ILCA (now known as The Pokemon Works company) was also involved in and responsible for.

The negatives

Here we go. Bear with me, because there are a lot of negatives, and you’ll notice the first one as soon as you boot up the game: the performance is not good. Even on Nintendo Switch 2, Pokemon Champions runs at 30 frames per second. It also feels like a very choppy 30 FPS, and though I can’t say for sure, it feels like there might be frame pacing issues like Persona 3 Reload on Nintendo Switch 2 before its recent update. During my time playing, I even noticed what appeared to be frame drops when an opposing Pokemon was burned or paralyzed. Given that Nintendo Switch 2 is rendering two to four Pokemon on-screen at a time in an arena, this is not an intensive game in the slightest – it’s running poorly because it’s unoptimized, not because the console can’t handle it. Pokemon Scarlet and Violet and Pokemon Legends: Z-A both run at 60 frames per second on the new system, and going back to 30 feels really jarring because Pokemon Champions is not a significant visual improvement over either one. Overall, the game runs shockingly poorly on Nintendo’s latest console – you’d probably expect this choppy performance on a Switch 1 by now, but the fact that the menus have a microsecond of input lag on top of all these issues should tell you all you need to know. Interestingly enough, the menus feel very reminiscent of Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl – Champions’ menus also have low-resolution textures, even on Nintendo Switch 2, and feel clunky and slow to navigate. The fact we’re still dealing with clunky Pokemon menus in 2026 is, in a word, crazy.

Another significant problem with Pokemon Champions is the roster. I get that it’s launch day, but there are only around 180 usable Pokemon in the game. Sure, more will be added over time, but right now most fully-evolved Pokemon cannot be brought to the game. This means you’ll be seeing the same few top-tier Pokemon in battles after a while. Perhaps more baffling, however, is the total exclusion of franchise staple items like Life Orb, Choice Band, Choice Specs, the weather rocks, Assault Vest, Weakness Policy, and more. Again, I’m sure all of these Pokemon and items will eventually be added to Champions via updates, but with paid membership/Battle Pass games like this one, first impressions are very strong and my first impression is that they launched with the bare minimum in terms of Pokemon and item count. That doesn’t bode well for the future, but I’m absolutely open to being proved wrong there (and genuinely hope that I am!).

The biggest issue in Pokemon Champions for me personally, however, is that there is a staggering lack of options. You’re going to be playing VGC exactly how The Pokemon Company wants you to – not how you want to. Item clause is always enabled, for one, which means you can never run the same item on two Pokemon. Worse, there’s not even an option to play a full 6v6 single battle – not even in a private lobby with friends. You can only play 3v3 singles or 4v4 doubles, and that’s it. Future regulations may eventually allow 6v6 battles, but that’s just me being hopeful – there is currently no confirmation that we’ll ever get that option. Pokemon Champions is not the Pokemon battle simulator everyone wanted – it’s a VGC simulator, and if you want to play any other way, that’s too bad. Another problem I noticed is that you have to manually give your Pokemon items every single time you add them to a team. In mainline Pokemon games, they keep their held items in the PC Boxes, so you can pop them onto a team and they’ll already have their item. In Champions, you’re giving the team slot an item – so if I have Charizard holding a Charizardite X Mega Stone, and swap Charizard with Starmie, I now have Starmie holding a useless Charizardite X. I’ve tried my best to remember to change items, but I feel like people are inevitably going to forget to swap them out and wind up at a disadvantage.

Before we discuss the monetization, let’s rapid-fire a few more issues I noticed: transferring between Pokemon Home and Champions is finicky, as you can only send 30 at a time and then you must close Home and go to Champions to receive them and then go back to Home if you want more. There’s no offline or single-player content whatsoever, and no capability for local wireless battles. Though the removal of IVs does make things simpler, it also removes more options such as 0 Speed IV Trick Room teams, which deletes a layer of strategy from teambuilding. Most frustratingly, however, is that once a Pokemon from Home goes to Champions, you can’t transfer it to a main series game to train it there and then bring it back to Champions. So if I have a Venusaur in Champions but no VP to train it with, I’d bring it to Legends: Z-A to EV train it and use some EXP Candies… but when I bring it back to Champions, none of what I did in Z-A would apply because Champions took a snapshot of Venusaur’s status the first time it entered the game and reverted back to it. It’s a truly baffling decision that just makes raising Pokemon tougher for no real reason.

The monetization

At this exact moment in time – the beginning of the game’s lifespan – Pokemon Champions’ monetization doesn’t appear to be too bad. It’s impossible to say how good or bad it really is at this stage in the game’s life, because the starter pack bonuses are really helpful and will last most players a good while. But in six months? A year? When those bonuses have run out, will it be easy to get everything you need? My current thought: not exactly. Without Training Tickets, training Pokemon eats up a huge amount of VP. It costs 500 VP to change a Pokemon’s ability, for instance, and around 250 VP to change a move. You get about 300 VP from winning a Poke Ball Tier ranked battle, and less than that if you lose. That being said, there are missions you can complete to earn extra VP, and if you have the $5 per month/$50 per year membership, you can complete extra missions to earn even more VP. There are daily missions and permanent missions which stick around for good, so you’re likely to earn a good amount of VP early on. It doesn’t seem like you can actually buy VP, either, so that’s certainly a point in the game’s favor. I’m not a fan of the fact that there’s a $10 Premium Battle Pass and a $50 yearly membership, though.

The verdict

Pokemon Champions is critically undercooked. That doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with it, though! In my case, I wanted to write about all the problems I noticed with the game because Pokemon really needs to fix them. Before Champions came out, I was always skeptical. ILCA’s first Pokemon games were Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, which were panned as some of the worst Pokemon games of all time – that’s a conversation for a different day. The point is, though, I don’t understand why Pokemon decided to keep ILCA on board for what is quite possibly the most important game they have now. Pokemon Champions is supposed to be a game that brings new players into VGC – it’s supposed to be something impressive that people want to get involved with. But with all of these significant drawbacks, I fear that won’t happen – as we mentioned, many of BDSP’s mistakes were repeated here. Clunky menus, low-resolution textures, subpar performance, and the like – so what are we doing here? Pokemon Champions definitely has potential, and playing it makes me sad that the game isn’t better. Pokemon battles are one of my favorite pastimes, and it’s disappointing to see so many options removed from the game and so many problems with its execution.

What do you think of Pokemon Champions so far? Again, this article is written in the hopes that these issues are addressed, not to knock down anyone enjoying the game – there’s still fun to be had here even with all the drawbacks. In any case, let us know your thoughts on the game in the comments down below.