Pokémon Champions’ launch didn’t go over very well yesterday. Players who jumped into the battle sim on Switch ran into bugs and annoying limitations, and found that a surprising amount of content shown in the trailers was just not in the game. Now, The Pokémon Company has put out a statement apologizing for the state of the game and acknowledging some bugs it will be patching in the near future.
The statement is in Japanese, but has been translated by Pokémon fansite and database Serebii. Some of the known issues the team is looking to address include fixing the order in which Mega Evolutions unfold in battle and fixing the gender of a Gallade that shows up in the tutorial that appears to be female, despite that not technically being possible in the Pokémon games. We won’t forget this trans icon, though. The full list of identified bugs are as follows:
- Leech Seed’s in-game description is incorrect, which undersells its damage
- When players are both using a Mega Evolution transformation in the same turn, the order the animations play out may be bugged
- The gender of Pokémon in the tutorial and in recruitable teams is wrong
- The Lightning Rod ability can sometimes stop working if Encore has been used in the battle
- A bug that prevents you from choosing an attack if you hover over the Mega Evolve option during battle
While those issues will be fixed in a future update, one issue players were dealing with has already been addressed: a transfer bug that was making it impossible for some players to move their Pokémon from the Home storage app into Champions, instead putting their monsters in a limbo state from which they could not easily be recovered. To deploy the fixes for these other issues, Champions will be taken offline later tonight at 6 p.m. Eastern for two hours.
The statement ends with the company apologizing for any inconvenience, and saying it will continue looking into other issues beyond the ones listed in the post. Maybe look into why Mega Raichu X is in the trailers but not in the game? Feel free to patch that at the earliest opportunity.