[Gaming] Pokémon Champions - My honest takeaway
I haven’t been posting here much lately, but I’ve been playing Pokémon Champions since it came out and I’m honestly having a good time.
It might sound controversial, but as someone who grew up playing Pokémon, it’s amazing to see all the improvements they’ve made to make the competitive scene more approachable to newcomers. This is my main takeaway and something I really want to praise here, instead of all the "flaws" that X, Twitter, and Reddit have been spilling out.
Well, I’m not trying to defend it or say it's a perfect game, but as a long-time fan, it’s amazing to have an "official competitive battle simulator" that is free-to-play for everyone. As most competitive players know, if you wanted to dive into the mainline competitive scene, you would have to grind through the actual game until the end, then check out the metagame, and build 6–9 good competitive Pokémon with the right IVs, EVs, natures, TMs, and items. This is not normal. This is a full-time job. As a Pokémon fan, I would like to have tons of people enjoying competitive battles and creating different strategies; unlike other competitive games where you only need to learn the game, Pokémon was always this kind of full-time job where if you wanted to compete, you had to learn a ton of stuff.
All I can say is that I played a couple of competitive seasons and multiple online competitions, and even though I was never able to achieve anything "big," I would say that my top 10k in a world ranking was my biggest accomplishment. You might ask, "Why don't you get better?" Because I have a TON of things to do, and grinding a lot to get to know different strategies in an ever-changing metagame with the same 20 Pokémon (that I mostly don't enjoy using) isn't appealing to me. The barrier to adapt is also a big hurdle when you still need to build different battle-ready Pokémon. So yeah, if they are lowering this barrier, I'm definitely down for that.
I can accept the fact that at launch it’s locked at 30 fps—do you guys really care that much about that? "Oh, but they removed a ton of items." Yeah, it’s a free-to-play game that will receive support for a long time, so they will probably add those in a bit. I really don't think that if they launched a game with all the Pokémon ever created, all the items ever created, a 6v6 mode, 60 fps, and a lower farming barrier, people would actually be enjoying it. The fact is that even with 1000+ Pokémon, those competing would use the same 20 or 30 metagame Pokémon anyway. That’s a fact.
Also, if you, like me, enjoyed having your battles, creating strategies, and climbing the ranks for fun, keep yourself away from social media. It seems like you're unable to enjoy things these days; it feels almost criminal to enjoy something. Pokémon is a millionaire franchise, that's a fact, but as far as I know, the competitive scene and the RPG are not the "main products" in terms of money-making these days, so I don't expect special attention for them.
A thing I also noticed is that a lot of people are holding a grudge against ILCA after the BDSP remake "failure" (which I also enjoyed) and using it to rant over Champions, wrapping everything up like, "Hey guys, it’s ILCA! I knew it!" A lot of this ranting is justified from the point of view that BDSP started out controversially and was probably unfinished, but it is far from a bad game. I would say that I had a better time playing BDSP than my full playthrough of Pokémon Violet on my Switch.
I’m not sure if I’ve made myself clear up to this point, but I acknowledge all the mistakes, flaws, and the early state of the game. But come on, people, can't you wait a little bit? Just chill and play, wait for the updates, and keep demanding things from the developers. Stop shaming people for enjoying something; everyone has the right to enjoy anything. It's still a free country, by the way.