First Impressions of Pokemon Champions

Despite playing Pokemon since childhood, I’ve never really understood the battle system. At least, not on a competitive level. I’ve got enough of a handle on it to play the main story mode of the games (though I personally bristle when people characterize the games as “too easy”, I think their difficulty level is pretty fair if you don’t grind!) but the PvP element of it has always been way too complex and intimidating for me. There’s a laundry list of things about how Pokemon works that, if I were in charge, I would probably change. Some of that has to do with how the catching and raising works, some of that has to do with how battle works. But I’ll resist the urge to get into that here. In a lot of ways, I’m not the target audience for Pokemon Champions, the new free-to-play live service centered entirely on high-octane PvP battling. The couple of times I tried doing PvP matchmaking in Shield and Violet I got completely stomped and discouraged. The same has happened when I’ve tried…