When Pokemon Champions was unveiled, my excitement gravitated towards one specific aspect: As cool as an official battle simulator sounded, support for Pokemon Home was the main selling point.
While people might get into Pokemon for the competitive aspect, I’m in it to catch ’em all. Collecting every single ‘mon has been a longtime obsession, and I successfully built a “living dex” (a collection consisting of at least one of each Pokemon) over a couple of decades. After years of grinding, trading, egg-hatching, and transferring, I’ve gotten every one of my monsters starting from my Game Boy Advance through the Switch into the cloud via Pokemon Home.
But after all of that, my 1,000+ Pokemon are just happy-looking static sprites sitting in an app. Pokemon Home feels more like a retirement home. Maybe with Champions, I thought, I’d finally be able to let my pocket monster friends out to stretch their legs and have some fun.
After several hours of playing, I can say that Pokemon Champions isn’t what I was looking for.
Reported bugs and other launch issues notwithstanding, Champions has limitations that make the game unappealing to me. There’s little space by default to bring in your existing Pokemon, with only 30 storage slots in the free version of the game. You can pay for a subscription to expand storage, but when combined with the subscription for Pokemon Home, it sure feels like you’re paying a lot for very little. And even without that restriction, at launch Champions only supports fewer than 200 Pokemon out of the entire Pokedex of 1,025.
Right now, my main Champions team consists of my Hisuian Typhlosian from Legends: Arceus, my Aegislash from Y, my Steelix from LeafGreen, my Primarina from Sun, my Corviknight from Shield, and my Tyranitar from Colosseum. These are just some of my “all-stars” from games past: original party members from previous games. And after buying the Starter Pack for Champions, I’m able to fit in 49 of these all-stars, while 47 of them remain in Pokemon Home prison.
Free my guys.
I won’t lie and say that I haven’t felt any enjoyment from optimizing my teams, and there’s something deeply nostalgic about seeing my favorites all together. However, the gameplay itself is already growing stale for me, as I face the same teams and techniques from online opponents repeatedly. And my frustration over not being able to use a huge chunk of my existing Pokemon roster still stands–if I can use my beloved Swampert (and its Mega Evolution) in Legends: Z-A, why is it not among the various starters in Champions? I realize that post-Dexit games haven’t let you use the entire Pokedex, so this isn’t a new complaint. But I was hoping that Champions might be a special case–especially if The Pokemon Company wants it to be the franchise’s end-all-be-all battle game.
Even if Pokemon Champions didn’t have such restrictions, battling ultimately isn’t the main reason I come to Pokemon, so perhaps the game was never going to be sustainable for me. I’m into the franchise not only as a Pokemon collector, but as someone who wants to play with these cute, digital creatures and bond with them through many experiences. The endearment for the Pokemon I caught, raised, and took on adventures is strong, and I feel spoiled by the fact that I’m able to bring my treasured Swampert from Sapphire all the way to modern games in the series. But they deserve more to do.
The top item on my Pokemon franchise wishlist is quite simple: a game that lets you pull in any of your Pokemon for a variety of activities.
Reject modernity, embrace ranching.
There’s precedent for Pokemon games letting you do some amusing things with your ‘mons stuck in storage. An obscure pull from the franchise is My Pokemon Ranch, a WiiWare title that let you transfer Pokemon from Diamond and Pearl from your Nintendo DS and place them in, well, a ranch. Your Pokemon were rendered in rudimentary and cartoony 3D models, which was a cute novelty, and you could interact with them and take pictures.
More entertaining to me is the oft-forgotten Poke Pelago feature in Pokemon Sun and Moon. Hidden in the in-game PC, Pelago let you place your stored Pokemon on different islands, where they could train for XP, plant berries, or go on expeditions to find items. Personally, I’d love something that incorporates ideas from both of these games–an experience that lets you enjoy the novelty of walking around with your whole Pokedex while giving them active and fun tasks.
The Pokemon Company can build a whole ecosystem rooted in Home and connected to Champions, and one that allows Pokemon fans outside of the competitive community to play and interact with the collection they’ve built. The Pokemon franchise is celebrating 30 years, and what better way to honor the community than by rewarding players for the decades of catching, trading, and collecting they’ve done?
Because after you catch ’em all, it’s hard not to wonder: What do you do with them now?
