Pokemon's new platform for competitive battling.

I'm curious if anyone here has ever dipped their toe into competitive battling, whether through online ranked mode, VGC, Showdown, or even just the Battle Tower mode in the main games.

What always turned me off from it is having to spend hundreds of hours on teambuilding; it looks like Champions obviates that by letting you just directly modify your Pokemon's moveset, ability, and stats. To me, this is huge, and it's gotten me playing SV ranked matches online, doing research into competitive Pokemon strategies, and thinking about attending a local event. Apparently The Pokemon Company officially sanctions local, regional, and national events where you can earn Championship Events to qualify for Worlds, there's this whole canonical ecosystem that your local comic book shop is probably part of. Very intriguing.

I also watched this video recently and thought it was pretty fascinating:



What's interesting to me is that, despite being one of the most complicated games in the world, we all sort of already have an education in Pokemon thanks to childhood brainwashing. The power of marketing has forced us to cache the fundamentals of this game in our brains, and now the complexities have room to shine and are that much more tantalizing. I'm not typically into turn-based games, but Pokemon's specific double battle format seems to so perfectly combine simplicity of player verbs with the combinatorial explosion of 1000 different Pokemon that, so far, it seems to click for me.

We'll see if this is just a week-long obsession of mine or something I'll stick with, but I'm curious what effect Champions will have on me and on VGC at large. It could make it way more popular and even more competitive.

For me, my least-fave thing about Pokémon has always been the battles, so I have zero interest in something like this. Hopefully, separating this out allows the mainline games to start doing more interesting things with its systems.

All I know about competitive Pokemon is that people use shiny Pokemon to stall and everyone hates it

Pokemon What?

I've never heard of this.

I wish I could be excited for this.

There’s so much about the original Pokemon Stadium I love. I loved the minigames. Amanda and I still fire it up to this day to play them. Loved the Free Battle. Amanda and I play where we fire up the random number generator, pick our teams via Pokédex number, and go toe to toe with random Pokemon teams. It’s a ton of fun. Also loved being able to play the original Pokemon games at “Dodrio” speed, which was a great way to level up Pokemon quickly back in the day, and a cool way to play Pokemon on the TV.

Unfortunately, this new game is very much just a niche release that caters to the most competitive players. As much as I’d wish it’s a successor to Pokemon Stadium, this isn’t it. I hate to hate on a game for what it isn’t, but I have always just wanted a follow up to Pokemon Stadium. Champions is: No minigames, no arcade Free Battle, just competitive batting using your own Pokemon. That’s cool for some but unfortunately I don’t think I’ll get anything out of this one.

@PogueSquadron

With how common this sentiment is, someone should just vibecode a compilation of Pokémon Stadium mini-game clones and sell it for five bucks on Steam.

Hmm...

@Secret_TunnelSeriosuly! Yeah it’s one of those games where it’s like, obviously that’s just not what they were going to do with this game.

We WERE able to get our Free Play arcade action in with Pokemon Battle Revolution….but only after using some nefarious means to get a save file that had EVERY Pokemon on it up to that point. It wasn’t nearly balanced at all, and half the Pokemon could just one shot each other, but it was still fun. If they ever expand Champions into something beyond the competitive scene, I’d be down for it.

I do love the depth of Pokemon VGC, but what I always come back to with competitive games (and sports!) is that the process of iterative mastery never sustains my interest. I enjoy trolling my fellow amateur SF players with Dhalsim, but I will never spend six hours in the lab actually learning how to use Ryu to give myself a sliver of an advantage. I tried building a gimmick Destiny Bond team in Pokemon Champions last night, and it's fun, but it actually is less optimal than really engaging with the game on a straightforward level, and that's not really my thing.

I once had a competitive team featuring a Gliscore that could heal itself by poisoning itself.

I had fun with competitive stuff but admittedly could only have success by just looking up ways online to use certain Pokemon.