Nintendo's new battle-focused Pokémon Champions arrived this week as a stripped-down successor to the Stadium legacy, promising pure PvP combat without the grind of catching, breeding, or collecting badges. What it delivers instead is a functional but underwhelming experience that feels more like a mobile game wearing a Switch costume than the battler fans have waited 26 years to see.
The core gameplay is solid. Champions pulls directly from the series' classic turn-based combat: you assemble a team of six Pokémon, pick moves simultaneously, and battle opponents in either 3v3 single or 4v4 double formats until one side is wiped out. It's the same system that made Pokémon Battle Revolution work on the Wii, and it remains engaging even stripped of story or side diversions.
The problem is what's missing. Champions launches with just 186 Pokémon, barely an improvement over the original Stadium's 151. The roster reads like a popularity contest: Charizard and Sylveon headline, while Porygon and Lickitung didn't make the cut. Most early evolutions are absent entirely. Bigger surprises: Rillaboom, Mewtwo, Mew, and the majority of Legendaries are nowhere to be found.
For competitive players, the damage cuts deeper. Of the 22 Pokémon that appeared on teams at last year's World Championships Masters Division, only three exist in Champions. The held item selection is equally thin: mostly healing berries and move-type boosters, with rare gems like Scope Lens and Light Ball barely offsetting the absence of staples like Choice Specs, Air Ballon, and Power Herb that serious competitors rely on. With the World Championships scheduled for August, Champions may struggle to establish itself as a legitimate competitive platform in time.
Getting Pokémon onto your team requires either importing them from Pokémon Home or recruiting through an in-game system. The Home integration works smoothly enough, but the recruitment method is pure gacha: a rotating pool of random Pokémon, one free pull per day, and Victory Points (the free currency) or paid resources to unlock others permanently or temporarily. It's the first clear sign that Champions is essentially a mobile game waiting to fully launch on phones later this year.
The gacha DNA is everywhere. Menus and currencies evoke mobile games designed to monetize downtime. A $7 Starter Pack bundle exists, and a Battle Pass grants access to the full reward pool. Nintendo has at least not made the free experience immediately painful, handing out generous starter gifts and keeping progression feasible without spending. Whether that generosity lasts remains unclear.
One genuinely interesting system: the Training feature lets you spend Victory Points to enhance a Pokémon's individual stats, swap moves, change abilities, and alter nature. These tweaks stay locked to Champions and don't transfer elsewhere, but they create real strategic depth for team building. The catch: paying VP for customization opens a door toward pay-to-win territory if Nintendo ever lets players buy the currency directly with cash.
After early playtime, Champions feels like potential waiting for follow-through. It functions as a way to battle globally, and the combat itself scratches a real itch. But the skeletal roster and gacha mechanics create friction. Most players will need to import Pokémon from Home to make Champions worth their time, which means they already own more complete games.
Live service updates will presumably expand the roster and item pool. How quickly and how comprehensively remains a mystery. For now, Champions reads as a promising foundation hamstrung by launch constraints and a business model that prioritizes monetization over generosity. Whether it evolves into the Stadium successor fans deserve, or remains a stripped-down ditto, hinges on what Nintendo does next.
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