Pokémon Champions is coming out next month and more details are trickling out about the Switch/mobile battle simulator, which is making some pretty drastic changes to competitive Pokémon play that the scene will have to contend with when it becomes the go-to platform for ranked play at major tournaments.
In a group interview that GameSpot was present for, director Masaaki Hoshino revealed a few big things, both about how the game will be altering the way that Pokémon are trained and how it will modify the format of competitive matches. The first big reveal GameSpot mentions is that, for monsters recruited in the game itself, Champions is doing away with the series’ usual IV system. This system, “Individual Values,” is essentially Pokémon genetics, meaning that some monsters are naturally equipped to do some things better than others of their species. You can catch two Pokémon of the same kind and level and one might have more speed or special attack than the other. That’s because their Individual Values are distributed differently. This matters to competitive players because certain IV distributions are better equipped to handle certain strategies that lean on specific stats, but Champions is changing this up a bit.
This decision came after a “”heated discussion with [Shigeki] Morimoto,” one of the original designers on Red and Green, and the end result is that the IV system is being dropped for monsters in Champions to make the experience more approachable.
The Effort Value system, a separate side of the metagame that players can actually influence, allows players to manipulate stats by training a Pokémon in a specific way. This system is being simplified for Champions, allowing players to freely allocate an additional 66 points to whatever stats they please, but that’s the under-the-hood stuff. What about the Pokémon selection in Champions? Well, it’s a bit more limited than folks were probably anticipating.
According to Hoshino, Champions will only include fully-evolved Pokémon at launch, though this may change down the line. So, for example, you can have a Charizard or a Blastoise on your team, but not their pre-evolved forms Charmander or Squirtle. Oddly enough, Pikachu seems to be an exception to this, as the series’ mascot has been shown in promo material and is on the cover of the game. You might be wondering why someone might want a pre-evolution when a final form is, in theory, stronger, but Pokémon does have some strategies that work better with a pre-evolution. The Eviolite held item increases the stats of Pokémon that haven’t reached their final form yet, and in some cases that can make them more viable in the competitive scene than they would be in their fully evolved state.
We’ll see how the community at large reacts to this, but I would be surprised if folks took kindly to the new competitive format undercutting the rulesets players have been using for decades at this point. Pokémon Champions is coming to Switch on April 8, with plans for a mobile version to launch later this year.