Pokémon Champions - A revolution for battles?
25-03-2026 14:00 UTC by Joe Merrick (Serebii).
Recently, The Pokémon Company International invited me to play an early build of Pokémon Champions, the coming battle game that will be available on Nintendo Switch as well as mobile. It has been 20 years since the last game dedicated solely towards Pokémon battles, so it has quite a legacy to live up to.
This game is being developed by The Pokémon Works and led by GAME FREAK and is pretty much what it sets out to be, a new place to battle Pokémon in a competitive set-up away from the traditional main series games.
To preface this, I'm going to be approaching this preview from two perspectives in one; from the perspective of Serebii – looking to all players and an analysis of how the game is as a game, and the perspective of a now retired VGC player who has played at over half a dozen National/International level events, commentated a Regional Championships event, as well as having attended the Pokémon World Championships annually for the past 10 years.
We got to play it for almost an hour, starting with a simple tutorial which walked through Single Battles, Double Battles and then Mega Evolution, and then got to battle some of the others who were playing the preview at the time.
Tutorials
The tutorial aspect is really good. It is so in-depth with tons of options that will help players come to terms with the basics of competitive battling, detailing how the mechanics work and so forth.
While we couldn't go deep into the tutorials due to time, I saw a lot of useful things that will give the new player the basics to fully understand how these battles work. Seeing it, I am brought back to Earl's Pokémon Academy in Pokémon Stadium 2 and remember how that taught me the full fundamentals of the mechanics of battles back then, and really taught me how to think strategically and use more than just the big powerful move in battle, and that was what made me start to want to play competitively.
These tutorials have you battle the examples and really give the feel for how it works, and that is something that has been somewhat missing from the main series Pokémon games where they just throw you in, expecting the knowledge.
I can't overstate how useful this is going to be to help onboard new players into competitive Pokémon, and for those who already know, it gives a variety of rewards that can help you train your Pokémon in this game so are still worth doing, plus it can help refresh on the fundamentals.
Modes
The game's modes are fairly quite simple. Other than the tutorial, there is just the Ranked Battles, Casual Battles and Private Battles. There's no single player content made visible here, it's just the multiplayer battles.
I do feel this may be a little bit of a miss as they could have done content akin to Pokémon Stadium or even Pokémon Battle Revolution with the Pokémon you accrue and build here, but right now as of the build we played and all the content revealed, the multiplayer battles are it. This could also work against the game a little as only having the multiplayer battles means there's not really that much incentive for the more casual player to jump in and have a go. If it included some single player modes, more people would jump in with their teams and try it, then through that carry over to the Ranked modes.
I also saw menu options for Online Competitions and Battle Data, but I was unable to dive in to them, especially the latter, to see what they entailed, but we do know that the first online competition is coming in April.
Recruiting
So how do you get the Pokémon in the game? One option is to transfer them in from Pokémon HOME, which is done within the game itself and not via Pokémon HOME, and bring your Pokémon from across the series and use them here. We know from the Pokémon Day reveal that the Pokémon you bring in can be edited here, but that won't carry back over to Pokémon HOME…but the game will remember any edits you make if you bring it back (in the same form it is if it is capable of form changing).
However, not everyone has that option and not everyone has all the Pokémon in their collections, so this game has to have a means for players to obtain Pokémon.
Enter the Recruiting mode. Here, you will go to the special Roster Ranch where you will be able to recruit Pokémon. This allows for you to bring in 10 Pokémon at a time to recruit. You can then check the Pokémon and their stats and decide to recruit them.
Recruiting can be done in two ways, you can run a temporary recruit where you can borrow it for 7 days, but you'll be unable to edit it, or you can permanently recruit it with Victory Points or a Quick Ticket.
The Pokémon that you pull in the recruit refresh every 22 hours, but you can reroll it using Victory Points. It cost us 2,200 Victory Points to redo it, so we can assume that can run at 100 Victory Points for every hour remaining on the timer. In my eyes, this is good, but also I fear potential monetisation of it. While it has been made clear there's no way to purchase Victory Points with actual money, the rolling of it just makes me a little bit nervous. That said, it is satisfying, and for another reason too; Shiny Pokémon can be obtained during this.
Shiny Pokémon will be made very clear; the icon for them will be surrounded by sparkles and when you check the Pokémon out, there will be a ring of sparkles around it. This will encourage you to keep going, as Shiny Pokémon are obviously always sought after. Alas I didn't get one myself, but a friend of mine did.
Marks are also able to be on the Pokémon that you can find in the Ranch, such as Toxapex the Sociable, indicating it has the Uncommon Mark. It has a special animation as it appears too.
Editing
So you have your Pokémon and want to train it. While most Pokémon will come with a basic level of training and move set, customisation is the key element to competitive Pokémon and honestly, in Pokémon Champions, it has never been easier to do.
There are no levels in this game, so all Pokémon are basically set to be what they would be at Level 50, much like how Ranked Battle works in the traditional main series titles. As such, the stats are adjusted accordingly.
Through the demo, it also became very clear that yes, IVs are no longer in the game, at least not in a way that we see and can alter. All Pokémon are basically factored in as if they have a 31 IV in every stat and there was absolutely no way that I could see to adjust them. This is going to be a point of contention, and definitely a subjective thing as IVs were always something many wanted to be scrapped, while others didn't.
While there are very, very, few use cases for HP, Defense and Sp. Defense having less than maximum on its stat, Attack and Speed especially definitely did; with moves such as Foul Play using the target's Attack stat, players frequently went for the 0 to make it do less damage, and Speed is the most vital one as you will want as low as can be in a Trick Room. Some players, myself included, sometimes did a sneaky thing of having a Speed IV be a couple of values under maximum when doing a mixed Trick Room & Tailwind leaning team, so that once Trick Room was in effect, if there was a mirror on the field, or something with the same Speed stat, the Pokémon with the lower Speed IV would move first but wouldn't be too slow to impede it when not in a Trick Room but with Tailwind in play.
Similarly, some players did it to under-speed to set a different weather or terrain to basically overwrite an opponent's one that they set that turn, or to mess around with abilities such as Beast Boost, Protosynthesis or Quark Drive where if a Pokémon would have the same stat value across its two highest stats at max IV, optimising one by having a lower IV would be the play to make sure say Speed gets boosted. There are many examples of things like this in both Singles and VGC formats such as getting a Speed focused Beast Boost on Kartana which requires less than maximum IVs on the Kartana's Attack stat, that these interactions will be missed. Others include Raging Bolt where if you, for some reason, wanted to make sure Protosynthesis boosted Speed or Special Defense over Special Attack, you would need to make sure not to Hyper Train its Special Attack stat and run a nature that lowered Special Attack to do it. With no IVs, however, this is just entirely not possible and some Pokémon you will just be unable to change the boost from Protosynthesis, Quark Drive or Beast Boost.
In fact, Speed is going to be the stat most heavily affected by this, and moves such as Gyro Ball will have varying effectiveness as some slow Pokémon will go from having a massively powerful Gyro Ball to a much weaker version of the move which can go from a 2 hit KO of an opponent to a 3 hit KO of the same opponent.
Now, as IVs aren't in it, the stats of a Pokémon will be much more homogenised and more intricate planning of it for these examples will not be possible. Is this a good thing? Perhaps, perhaps not, that all depends on how much you min/max your stats and go for these unique, albeit not that uncommon, use cases for lower than maximum. I personally am a little apprehensive about it, but I get why it has been done, and why many may be happy about it. That said, if anything, I'd say that the method Pokémon Champions uses for stat alteration would have been perfect to show how these niche interactions can happen and give players a way to finally do it in an easy way which doesn't warrant a lot of luck.
That said, it's not entirely without customisation. As we have seen before Effort Values are in, but in a slightly different manner. Rather than it being 8 Effort Points to get +1 in a stat like it would be at Level 50, this time it's literally just giving +1 Point. You can put up to 32 in a stat, and a total of 66 Points in stat adjustment in total and the more you adjust, the more Victory Points it costs. This is basically displayed as a scale as well so you can see the additions in real time in a visual way beyond just the number. This is quite possibly the best and easiest way they could have displayed it and allowed for it to be edited.
You can also change a Pokémon's moves. Rather than there being a level up list, a TM list and so forth, there is just one big list of moves. This did mean that it did take a little to find the moves that I wanted, but they could thankfully be sorted and filtered so if you're looking for a specific move that the Pokémon can learn you will be able to narrow it down. My only wish is for the menu to be a bit smaller so more moves could be seen at once. It costs 250 Victory Points for each move. Most moves also natively have the PP it would have if it had a PP Max used on it in the traditional main series games, but I couldn't find a consistency between them.
It's also worth noting that the game will give full details on the moves including the actual Speed Priority bracket, if it's a wind move and so forth, all features that were hidden before that needed external sites and resources to inform people.
Natures and Abilities are also customisable in this manner, costing 500 Victory Points each to change.
Hold Items are also in, available to purchase from the in-game shop, and as we know from the Pokémon Day reveal, through the Battle Pass, though we were unable to access that to see what price and currency it uses, but once you purchase the item, you have it forever and it can be used on any Pokémon. You can only get one of each item, but that follows standard Item rules in competitive play: you can only have 1 of specific item on your team at any time.
This level of quick customisation for a Pokémon is really unprecedented in the Pokémon games and it really makes it so simple to build the team that you want. It took literal minutes for me to build a team and while I personally can do it in a similar time in Pokémon Sword & Shield and Pokémon Scarlet & Violet right now, that's entirely due to me having the resources accrued already by the endless amounts of Max Raid Battles and Tera Raid Battles that I have done over the last 6 and a half years, and that's still a dwindling resource and I know most people don't have the same resources that I do.
There are also some options where it will automatically give you teams or readjust a team for you.
Once you have built your Pokémon, you can then put them in a Battle Team, which is where you assign the items, and they are good to go in the game's battle modes.
Victory Points
The fact that customisation takes Victory Points is a bit of sticking point. Victory Points have been confirmed to not be tied to the game's microtransactions, so getting them comes in many different ways.
The first, is simply by battling. As you battle through the game's modes, you will receive Victory Points for your participation. However, we don't have a set amount for this beyond one screenshot showing 200VP at the lowest level so can't really judge how easy it is to get them until we see if that number varies based on various conditions such as rank.
However, the game has missions for you to complete. These missions come in four varieties: Daily, Weekly, Starter and Membership, so you will have a continual cycle of missions to go through. These missions include things such as logging in, recruiting a Pokémon, competing in Ranked Battles, using super effective moves a certain amount of times and so on.
They don't only give Victory Points however, but a variety of things including Recruit Tickets and more, so there will always be a reason to get them and will give reasons to keep battling and even come back daily, as is standard on mobile games and games as service.
However, how easy Victory Points are to get is really going to be the sticking point here. With it costing around 2000 VP to edit each individual Pokémon, and you needing a team of 6 that means you ideally need 12000VP if you want to fully build a team of six. This is something that I know VGC players are going to need to know, as many times VGC players will adjust or build their team last minute for some final tweaks, and if they run out of time to accrue the points, it could cause a couple of problems with setting up a team for live events, especially as there are no means to trade Pokémon between players in this game, and while Pokémon HOME can negate some of this, it's not an option for all players.
Hopefully when the game launches we will see the ways of earning Victory Points, but it is the big part of the game that has me a little apprehensive ahead of Pokémon Champion's adoption into the Play! Pokémon circuit.
It's so unbelievably easy to now build the Pokémon you want, but you need to have the resources to get to it.
Battles
So let's talk about the battles. The battles we played through were part of the Casual Battle system and connecting to other players in the preview so we got to get a proper look at how the battles work.
If you have played multiplayer battles in prior Pokémon games, then you basically know what to expect as the fundamentals have not changed for Pokémon Champions. If you haven't, then you basically go through menus and select your Pokémon's moves and the battles then play out based on your Pokémon's stats and then when the turn is over and all Pokémon have had their chance to use a turn, you return to the menu to decide the next turn until one player's Pokémon are all knocked out.
With the teams we provided, we managed to get a good look at how it ran and there are definitely a fair few things to note. First, after the moves got to be a bit snappier in Pokémon Scarlet & Violet due to the open world nature of the game which many argued came at the cost of the visual flair of moves, in Pokémon Champions the moves are a bit more cinematic in their presentation which I know a lot of people have been asking for. The pop-ups for stat alterations and everything felt snappy, but I was unfortunately unable to test to see how it would run if say an ability akin to Anger Shell was activated, but we did see Intimidate activate both opponents simultaneously, and often we get an animation without extra text which bodes well.
The only thing I noticed that made me a bit uneasy about the pace of battles was when I used a Mega Alakazam in one of the battles. I had set up Psychic Terrain and went with Expanding Force. Rather than the animation happening once and both Pokémon getting damaged at the same time, as what happens in Pokémon Scarlet & Violet, it instead ran the animation on one Pokémon, then we saw Mega Alakazam do the move animation again and hit the second Pokémon. At first it made me think maybe the mechanics had changed and Expanding Force wouldn't hit both opponents, but then the second animation came. I hope it's because this is an early build of the game but if that is the intended case, then I do hope this isn't a recurring thing for spread moves as that will elongate the battles somewhat and frankly doesn't seem necessary.
The most interesting change I noted was when I decided to look into the Battle Data menu during the battle. While for the last few generations we have been able to see data such as how many turns of Trick Room are left, what stage a stat is at, we never actually had the numbers given to us in an official manner. Here, I had a look at my Pokémon after it had been Intimidated by an Incineroar and saw that yes, its Attack stat was reduced by one stage, but next to the arrows showing the stages down it specifically had the number 0.67 (presumably rounded), indicating the multiplier used on the stat. This is a huge win for accessibility because, even though the more hardcore competitive VG players would know this off the top of their heads, for new players they would not know what that means without going to external sites such as Serebii.
The battle mechanics are the same as before, even down to moves like Sheer Cold hitting right when you don't want them to; yes I lost due to Sheer Cold hits.
The battles are definitely where the game excels, but with that, it's not doing much new so you basically know what to expect going in. While the introduction of the Mega Evolutions from Pokémon Legends: Z-A is going to shake things up, meta-wise, everything else is basically how you know it and how it has been for a while.
Also, while I wouldn't want to necessarily confirm any move additions or removals for Pokémon's movepools as that can change before the game is live, we can confirm that Mega Dragonite has the Multiscale ability and Mega Froslass has Snow Warning.
Presentation
The game's presentation actually surprised me a bit. While I was expecting endless menus for the customisation and all there was to the game, seeing all the characters from Frontier, the city the game is set in, adorn the menus in full 3D modelled animation was a nice touch and really added some life to the game. Seeing the cool animation every time we reset Roster Ranch to look for new Pokémon was good too.
Visually, the game looks solid. It is a bit clear that this is a Nintendo Switch game running on Nintendo Switch 2. It's not perfect as the visuals do have a bit of a blur and pixelation from an upscaled resolution, but on the TV screen it looked great. The game uses the Pokémon models that were developed over the past few years since Pokémon Legends: Arceus introduced the more intricate models and the Pokémon in general looked great, and the animations were nice, colourful and bombastic and the Stadium we played in looked great. Gone is the complete blurry look that we had in the 2025 footage of the game, it does in fact look crisp which has alleviated so many of my concerns about visuals.
Frame rate wise, I didn't really see any issues personally, which eased some concern I have had from prior footage where the frame rate seemed all over the place, but we were told that this was an in-development build so things will change so I don't really want to go into a full frame rate analysis until the game is out in April.
The music is great, there's some unique music to the game which just fits the battle vibe, and when you go into battles you can set the music to various battle music from prior Pokémon games. Some of Pokémon's best attributes as a series is the music so bringing returning music back for this is great.
Conclusion
Overall, I enjoyed my time with Pokémon Champions (despite the Sheer Cold shenanigans), but as a VGC player that was to be expected. The battles are fun to play, it's so simple to edit the Pokémon and it is going to open competitive Pokémon up to a whole new range of people as it has never been simpler to build a team.
I have some concerns about ease of getting Victory Points and from that getting the items you need and Pokémon adjusted as you desire them, but if they aren't that hard to accumulate and you can get the items you need without endless hours of grinding, then we should be good.
While I wish there was more to do in a single player capacity, which could create such a bigger incentive for new players to jump in, what the game does do, it seems to be doing well.
This could truly be the most accessible version of competitive Pokémon so far. If it succeeds and becomes the platform for competitive Pokémon going into Pokémon Winds & Waves and beyond, with continual addition of Pokémon and battle mechanics like Z-Moves, Dynamax and Terastallization, which were teased with the Omni Ring artwork, then based on what I've played thus far, we're in a good place with this game from a competitive standpoint. It just may need an extra boost to lure new people in.
As a Pokémon fan, I'm intrigued as to how it will progress, and as a VGC player, I want to jump in again right now.
Pokémon Champions releases on Nintendo Switch on April 8th 2026 and on mobile devices later this year.
Version Tested: Nintendo Switch version running on Nintendo Switch 2
Footage provided by Nintendo & The Pokémon Company International
| Preview Video | |