Happy Pokemon Day! We’ve had our annual slice of PokeCake and now we’re sat here picking icing out of our teeth and digesting the copious number of sugary reveals Game Freak poured down our throats.
There was a lot to take in during the short presentation. We kicked things off by covering all the latest events in Pokemon’s myriad mobile games before moving onto the real stuff. While I expected Pokemon Legends: Z-A to feature prominently – although I thought we’d see at least one new Mega evolution – one thing not on my Pokemon Day list was an official, Game Freak-and-Nintendo-approved Pokemon Showdown.
But it looks like that may be what’s happening. Many people have pointed to Pokemon Champions and shouted, “new Pokemon Stadium!”, but I think it’s slightly different. This isn’t New Pokemon Stadium, it’s Official Pokemon Showdown.
What We Know About Pokemon Champions
I’ll be straight with you, the short Pokemon Champions trailer didn’t give much away. It’s 2v2 battles, like the esport. That’s notable. It will be available on mobile and Switch. That’s also notable. This seems to be intended as an easy route into competitive Pokemon battling.
We also see Pokemon Mega Evolve and Terastalize, which is surprising. Maybe the Pokemon Company is bridging the gap between battling in the Legends games and the main series, but this is a rarity nonetheless. Pokemon Legends: Z-A clearly has a spin on real-time battles which wouldn’t work in a turn-based format, so there’s some sleuthing needed to be done to work out what’s going on here.
The answer is probably as simple as ‘Megas sell games’.
However, we can learn more from the press releases. The official Pokemon press site explains that, “Pokemon Champions continues the tradition of Trainers pitting their skills against those of others from around the world, with the aim of allowing core game-style battles to be enjoyed by more players than ever before.”
That also makes sense. Pokemon VGC, the format the esport runs, is more popular than ever. Last week saw Wolfe Glick win the EUIC, the biggest official Pokemon tournament ever. One year ago, he also won the biggest ever Pokemon tournament. These competitions are growing to an almost untenable level.
But how do people practice for these tournaments? Sure, they build their teams in the official games. They breed for IVs and train for EVs and find the right items. But for practice? Most people use Pokemon Showdown.
An Official Pokemon Showdown
Pokemon Showdown is an unofficial, fan-made, browser game that can be used to battle PvP matches without having to go through the rigmarole of training up your entire team. It’s perfect for trialling new strategies, tweaking EV spreads, or just finding quicker, more exciting battles than you can on the ranked ladder in Pokemon Scarlet & Violet. Many players, serial champion Glick included, use Showdown to build teams and practice.
“I do use Showdown to prepare for tournaments,” Glick told me six years ago. “I generally do some laddering and then use [Showdown] to test versus other players I trust.”
It’s always amazed me that Pokemon Showdown has lasted this long without a DMCA from the Pokemon Company, but the game persists. Now, I think Pokemon has created an official rival.
The Japanese website for Pokemon Champions offers a little more information. It tells us that we’ll be able to send monsters from Pokemon Home to Champions, á la Stadium with Game Boy games, and that there will be casual, ranked, and private battles available. While this is slightly different from Showdown, I suspect it’ll be used for the same reasons.
There will be a way to capture or create Pokemon in Champions, we know that much for certain. These Pokemon cannot be transferred back to Home, suggesting that it may be easier to edit their IVs or EVs in the battle-focused game. I suspect the developers will add some kind of grinding element (and monetisation) that Showdown doesn’t have, but otherwise it seems like the official practice battle simulator that fans have spent years crying out for.
Pokemon has been working towards making the competitive scene more accessible for a long time. Bottle caps were the start, rental teams took things to the next level, and Pokemon Champions seems to be the culmination of its efforts to help every player dream of lifting a trophy on the biggest stage of all.
Building a Pokemon team is easier than ever before. If Pokemon Champions is everything we think it will be, or even close to an approximation of Pokemon Showdown, then the Pokemon tournaments of the future will be bigger than ever before. And might be played on your phone.
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