Pokémon games have had turn-based battle systems for 30 years, though last year’s Legends: Z-A shook things up with real-time mechanics that required you to rethink years of learned habits and strategies. While it was a divisive turn, Pokémon Champions has given turn-based competitive players a place to play that way for the foreseeable future, and it sounds like developer Game Freak intends for that to be the place for old-school battles as future games may continue to change things up.
In a video on the studio’s YouTube channel, game designer Shigeki Morimoto and Champions co-director Kazumasa Iwao spoke a bit about creating the battle simulator, and how the team wanted it to serve as a means of preserving the traditional turn-based battles while freeing up future games to experiment more.
[Translation via Resetera]
I think one of the biggest reasons behind it was that the battle system, the rules for competitive Pokémon battles that we’ve been using throughout the Pokémon series for so long, may gradually start changing as the Pokémon series moves forward.
And when that happens, there are people who have been enjoying the existing style of Pokémon battles for decades, going all the way back to Red and Green, Gold and Silver, and so on. So simply saying, “The battles have changed, so now please go play the new version,” didn’t really feel right either. That was something that had been bothering us at Game Freak for quite a while.
At the same time, we obviously want the series to continue taking on new challenges. But we also didn’t want to neglect the battle system we’ve had up until now. So we thought: maybe it would be good to make one game that carries forward the existing battle system and lets people continue playing it indefinitely. I think that was really the starting point for the development of Pokémon Champions.
Though they hint at future games continuing to evolve in terms of their battle systems, they don’t get into specifics about precisely how that may happen. If Legends: Z-A’s real-time battles are the blueprint moving forward, I’ll be delighted, but I know there are some Pokémon fans who didn’t like that shift when the game launched on Switch and Switch 2 last year. Based on some of the leaks circulating around the internet, next year’s Winds and Waves is seemingly going to maintain the original turn-based style, but perhaps whatever comes next will be something different. Only time will tell.