Pokémon Champions is out on Switch today, and its launch could be going better. Competitive players are up in arms about the battle simulator’s many restrictions and bugs, but one bug in particular may have ramifications that go beyond any one game, as some players are reporting that Pokémon they’ve attempted to transfer from the Home storage app to Champions are being caught in some kind of error, making it impossible to complete the transfer to Champions or send them back to the Home app.
Competitive Pokémon player Justin “AzazeL” Carris posted about the bug on X, and was met with responses from other players who have also found some of their favorite monsters in a weird limbo state. The Home error may pop up when transferring Pokémon over to Champions, whether that be in the Switch or mobile version of the app. There have been reports of this error code coming up when trying to transfer Pokémon from Home to various games over the years, so this issue predates Champions. However, in this case the app will register the affected Pokémon as “visiting” Champions, and as a result you cannot trade them back, essentially trapping the Pokémon in some kind of in-between place where they cannot be recovered or used in Champions.
Some folks have been able to resolve the issue by uninstalling and reinstalling Home, while others were given instructions to clear the game’s and system’s cache, but no one solution seems to be working for everyone at this time. We’ve reached out to The Pokémon Company and will update this story if we hear back.
Feeling pretty grateful that I didn’t experience this glitch myself. I was only able to transfer over a few of my favorites due to Champions’ limited roster, but some of those Pokémon I’ve had for years as they originate from the Game Boy Advance games so I’d really hate to lose them. Now I get to have normal, less stressful problems with Champions, such as asking why the hell Mega Raichu is in the game’s trailers but not the game itself.