The first thing I noticed when I loaded into Pokémon Champions is that the “adventure” is gone. There are no forests or caves to explore, no towns to visit and no professor with a lab coat. Instead, I was directly dropped into the city of Frontier and handed my very own gym — the main battlefield in the Pokémon franchise. Soon I realized that this wasn’t just a new Pokémon game. Rather, it was entirely centered around one aspect: battling.
In a traditional Pokémon title, you start as a fledgling trainer in a sprawling region filled with towns, routes and wild areas. You are allowed to explore, catch Pokémon in the wild and level them up, slowly building your team stronger. In contrast, Champions replaces this exploration element with a small barn area to “recruit” fully evolved Pokémon immediately, removing the entire training loop. While previous Pokémon games prioritized the completion of gym challenges to progress through the central storyline, Champions deviates from this tradition. Pokémon Champions has only your gym, no villains and no narrative, as it’s built entirely around competitive battles.
The shift in structure becomes even more obvious once you start battling. Because every Pokémon arrives fully evolved and battle‑ready, the game pushes you straight into competitive formats that normally take hours of grinding to reach. For players who already follow the Video Game Championships — the official Pokémon battling formats — this streamlined approach actually makes sense.
But that shortcut comes with trade‑offs. The game’s tutorial is long, scripted and surprisingly unhelpful. Instead of easing new players into competitive thinking, it rushes them through menus and mechanics with little explanation. For a game that markets itself as an accessible entry point, the onboarding feels strangely shallow. In addition, even though there are fewer Pokémon, item and move options, the game doesn’t explain how they work at all, leaving new players confused and experienced players underwhelmed.
“It just tells you what to do … it’s not as in-depth as I think it needs to be,” said sophomore Micah Rogers.
The catching system is one of the few places where Champions tries something new. Instead of wandering through fields, you search a small barn where Pokémon hide in bushes and can recruit Pokémon by spending victory points. It’s simple, but some players actually found it refreshing. It’s a tiny slice of adventure in a game that otherwise avoids exploration entirely.
“[In an earlier game] … I really wanted to catch this shiny Pokémon, but it ran away,” said sophomore Ryuma Elias “Now you don’t have to worry about that.”
Where Champions struggles most is depth.
“They only have selective types of Pokémon, so you can’t use all of them, limiting your potential with other Pokémon,” Elias said.
The roster of available Pokémon is limited, with only 186 out of the total 1,000, and the item pool is even smaller, with many competitive staples missing from the game.
The technical side doesn’t help either. Players mentioned reused animations, lag spikes and visuals that fall short of mainline titles.
“The graphics are definitely not as good as the main releases; they really pale in comparison to past quality,” Rogers said.
Still, Pokémon Champions isn’t without value. For players who want to battle without grinding through hours of story, it offers a fast, low‑stakes way to practice competitive formats. Champions can serve as an introduction to competitive Pokémon, using its simplicity as a way to get more players involved in the competitive scene.
That being said, many Pokémon game fans gravitate to the games primarily because of their beloved formula — an aspect Champions has moved away from.
“It’s a cool alternative for competitive players, but it’s definitely not to the point where I’d say that’s [going to] overtake the original [games],” Rogers said.
In the end, Pokémon Champions feels less like a full Pokémon game and more like a competitive playground — a stripped‑down experiment that succeeds at accessibility but stumbles in execution. Pokémon Champions is a promising idea, but it doesn’t feel complete, so I give it two out of five stars.
