Next month, Pokemon Champions will bring the turn-based action of Pokemon battles to Nintendo Switch 2–and later this year, to mobile devices. Champions will be making some impactful changes to the core battling mechanics of the Pokemon franchise, including the removal of one of the game’s most long-lasting statistics: Individual Values, or IVs.
IVs are stat modifiers that every individual Pokemon is assigned at random once caught by the player, and they impact how that Pokemon’s attack, defense, and HP grow as it levels up and evolves. Pokemon Champions will remove this randomization from the equation, though the reason for the change has not been fully explained.
Speaking with a roundtable of journalists over Zoom, development director and game producer Masaaki Hoshino says the decision to remove IVs was not taken lightly. In his words, it took a “heated discussion with [Shigeki] Morimoto,” one of Pokemon’s original designers, to get the change made, in the hopes of making the game’s barrier of entry lower for new players.
Champions will also simplify Effort Values, or EVs, another stat modifier baked into the core Pokemon experience. Instead of a Pokemon’s EV being determined by the Pokemon they’ve battled, EVs will be used to further boost any stat the player chooses, with up to 66 EVs available for each Pokemon. If a Pokemon is transferred to Champions from Pokemon Home, because of the difference in the EV system, that Pokemon will return to its previous stats once transferred to the Home service.
Pokemon Champions launches as a “free-to-start” download on April 8. Mobile versions of the game will be available later this year.