I Played Pokemon Champions Early

I received travel and free access to the event from the Pokemon Company International. All thoughts and opinions are my own. My experience may differ from yours. I played Pokemon Champions early, and I have a lot of thoughts. And I should clarify that I did this legally, I didn't just break into the Pokemon Company offices. I was fortunate enough to be invited by the Pokemon Company International to their headquarters out in Washington State. I, along with nine other Pokemon content creators, got to play about 45 minutes of Pokemon Champions.

Now I think it's worth noting that this experience was pretty on rails. However, I maybe discovered some things that I don't know if they intended for me to discover, but I did. I was not allowed to film anything.

Now, not just me. Nobody was allowed to film anything or record anything. So they have provided some B-roll for you to look at, but my exact experiences will not be able to be shared with you. This includes not only the gameplay, but I wasn't even able to do any filming

inside of the office, even with just my stupid face. However, what the Pokemon Company didn't account for is that I have a perfect photographic memory. And as long as I see an image for at least three frames, I can perfectly recreate it thanks to my experience was like. I will display it now on screen at great risk to myself legally.

Okay, now that I have implicated myself legally, let's actually get into the video. The first thing that was required of us, in our experience, was to complete four different tutorials. These were the single battle tutorial, the double battle tutorial, the physical special split tutorial, and the mega evolution tutorial. It felt like they covered a lot of the basics, and there were even additional tutorials, which I'm actually not sure if I'm allowed to mention them specifically, but there were additional tutorials that we didn't try, but I could tell what they were about because

of how they were named. Some of the mechanics mentioned in them are not the most obvious to players and how they work or why they're important, and so having a dedicated tutorial, I think, was good. The single battle tutorial was quite comprehensive. The double battle tutorial was actually quite short. And one of the only things that you did was click rock slide, which I personally found very funny, but none of them were super time intensive. And that matters because for completing the tutorials, you were awarded VP. Now VP appears to be the primary currency in this game and having tutorials award a decent bit of VP, I think

is pretty good. Now we do need to clarify that for the purposes of this experience, we had effectively as much VP as we needed. This will not be the case when it comes out. So I think that these tutorials, which are relatively short and give a decent bit of VP, will actually be pretty useful, even if you already know how to play the game. I'll talk more about VP in a bit. Now let's talk about recruitment, which is basically how you get Pokemon

in this game, assuming you're given a lineup of Pokemon and you can choose to recruit one from that lineup. This appeared to be randomly generated as far as I could tell. I couldn't really see any pattern personally. My guess is it basically just takes a subset of, I think it's 10 Pokemon that are like, I don't know, in the game's code and offers them to you to choose from. Now, here's where things get interesting. When you recruit a Pokemon, it comes with moves, ability, nature, and actually two of its stats are already maxed. The fact that these Pokemon already come with their stats maxed out or with

two stats maxed out is a pretty big deal because it means you can save on points and training. For most of my Pokemon, maybe all of them, I don't remember exactly, one of the stats that I was going to like max out anyway was already maxed out, and so that actually saved me a bunch of points. That being said, the stats are not always useful. I recruited a Feraligatr, hoping to see Mega Feraligatr's ability. I failed, but we'll get to that. And the Feraligatr had max attack, which was good, but also max defense,

which is just not the most efficient way of training it. I was looking through some of the B-roll footage that they sent over, and one of the things I noticed of two stats max, but like across the three Furfru, six different stats are maxed. This could mean that the same Pokemon basically just gets two stats maxed at random. But the thing is that each of the Furfru

had a different haircut, so it could also mean that each Pokemon that's like in the game comes preset with two stats or two, maybe two or three or four stats that can be maxed. We'll talk more about this in a second, is like fun, it feels like a mini game, and it's cool to like try out different Pokemon, but I suspect that if you're a veteran and you wanna jump into competitive play immediately,

Pokemon Home is probably gonna be a really good way of getting Pokemon. None of us in this preview were able to personally experience the Pokemon Home connectivity, because like we weren't bringing in our own Pokemon, so recruitment was kind of our only option,

and so I don't know as much about Pokemon Home Pokemon in as I would like. But that being said, I did enjoy the process of kind of just building a team with what I was given. I thought that was pretty fun. Okay, now is where we get into the really important stuff. This is one of the big questions that I had about the system. How easy is it to train your Pokemon? The answer, in my opinion, is quite easy. Compared to EV training in every prior game,

it is so nice to just have sliders. life improvements. Like one thing that I noticed is that when you have a Pokemon stats and you're raising it, like it's just sliders that you can move around. And it actually shows you where you get bonus points from your nature on the slider itself. It's actually a really clean and efficient way of visualizing that extra stat point,

which I also think is not super intuitive. Like I imagine that even some of you watching this don't have any idea what I'm talking about right now, Fine, because it's just gonna show you going forward. Changing abilities is super easy. You just click into the ability and then change to the one you want. Changing nature, same thing. There's a nice little grid. Changing your moves is also super easy.

You just click in and select the move that you want from a list of every move that the Pokemon can learn. I guess I don't know for sure that you don't have to unlock certain moves, everything including egg moves was there from the get-go. I personally confirmed that Raichu got fake out in Endeavor, for example, to moves that I know are egg moves. At least I say that confidently.

I'm pretty sure they're egg moves. Okay, here's where things start to get interesting. All right? The first thing that I need to tell you is as far as I can tell, IVs are gone. IVs or individual values are the mechanic that Pokemon has used for the duration of the franchise pretty much to make Pokemon feel unique.

It's the reason why one Pikachu might be stronger than another Pikachu. If you don't know how they work, or worked, the basic summary is that every Pokemon in every stat has an IV ranging from number zero to number 31. What this translates to is that at level 100, that Pokemon will get between zero and 31 extra stat points in that stat. I tried a lot of things to figure out how to change my Pokemon's IVs in the game, and I could not find anything. On the one hand, I think that this is a positive change in terms of lowering the barrier to entry to competitive Pokemon. I think IVs tend

to be confusing for players newer to the game, and honestly, even for some intermediate players. And 90% of the time, they don't actually add anything to competitive play. Most Pokemon just want most of their IVs to be as high as possible, and it's actually really easy to get good IVs in all your Pokemon now if you want them, between bottle caps and also just breeding being better in recent games. So I think that from a barrier of entry perspective, removing IVs is probably positive. However, I think that IVs are also a real form of skill expression.

In Scarlet and Violet, I have personally used many Pokemon with imperfect speed IVs to get an information advantage or a tactical advantage, making my Pokemon slower to intentionally under slow other Pokemon or outspeed them inside Trick Room. And this can have a really major impact. I personally think that at the highest level, IVs add a ton of depth to the game and they also impact certain strategies. Trick Room is a strategy that wants your Pokemon to be as slow as possible because in Trick

Room, slower Pokemon move first. Because of this Trick Room teams almost exclusively use Zero IVs and Speed Lowering nature on all of their Pokemon. Without IVs these Pokemon aren't able to be as slow as they would like, so on the whole this is a nerf against Trick Room teams. My main concern with this change to IVs by the way is the fact that speed ties are really really unfortunate in Pokemon, nobody likes them because they're literally just 50-50 chances. And a big part of the skill expression of IVs was choosing a speed stat that you suspected

other people would not be at, so you could actually make game plans rather than relying on coin flips. Even trick room teams, which typically want to be as slow as possible, will often run two or four speed IVs on a Pokemon, specifically for a trick room mirror match. With the removal of IVs, all this becomes a lot harder. This is also a nerf against special attackers across the board who don't use their physical attack stat and therefore prefer to have as low an Ivy as possible and attack.

This is because of moves like Foul Play, which uses the target's attack stat rather than the user's. And so especially for Pokemon weak to dark moves like Calyrex, Shadow, and Lunala, this becomes a pretty major deal. When you attack yourself in confusion, that also uses your physical attack stat. So across the board, this is like not good for special attackers, though I think it has

the biggest impact for Pokemon weak to foul play. We have to talk about PP. PP or power points is how many times Pokemon can use a move in a battle. So my first impression when I started playing was that all Pokemon had their PP maxed out. My Tyranitar had super power and that had a PP of eight, which I knew was the maxed out PP. However, what I learned is that there have been some changes. Moves that used to cap at 16 PP now cap at 12. For example, Earthquake. Moves that used to cap

at 24 PP now cap at 16. The biggest PP change was to Protect. Protect is the single most important move in the game, and previously in all past games, maxed out at 16 PP. It now caps out at 8. This is a really big deal. It is not that uncommon for a Pokemon to use Protect more than 8 times in a game, especially on teams with more bulk. This is a change that I think will have major impacts on the competitive scene. These pp changes across the board could also introduce some new strategies into play. For example, the move Spite, which lowers the target's pp of their last used move could be slightly more viable here. Crusher is an ability that is normally seen as worthless

and does not apply to the Protect change because pressure only works for moves that target the pressure Pokemon. But if you have two pressure users and your opponent's using Earthquake, that's only four Earthquakes.

And if you can block two of those with the Protect, well, you know what I mean? It's hard to predict the exact impacts of this, that would have been won before, especially with a Protect PP change, that will now be lost. We'll have to see how strategies adapt. But that wasn't the only thing that I learned, believe it or not. There have been some other nerfs to Pokemon.

Gengar, who was given Encore in, I believe, Scarlet and Violet, though it may have been Sword and Shield, was not able to learn Encore. This is a major deal. Knock Off is an incredible move on Incineroar and has pretty much been used exclusively as the dark move on it since it was introduced.

And so not having it, especially with the nerfs to Incineroar in Scarlet and Violet, well, it's a big deal. Keep in mind, I was not able to play for very long, so there are likely other moveset changes as well that I did not discover. The last thing I will say about training before we talk about the battles is that not all the held items were available for this experience.

Now, to be clear, my impression is that the items that I was not able to find are in the game. In fact, I would be shocked if they weren't. They just weren't available for purposes of our experience. I was not able to use any of the choice items will be unlockables, like via a battle pass, for example, or via VP, or whether they simply just weren't present in the version of the game that we played.

Either is possible. Regardless, I'm confident that in the final version, you will eventually be able to use all the items. Other items that were missing included many of the new mega evolutions. I imagine that this was done on purpose because the abilities for. I was not able to do it for any of the ones that I enlisted. And I think the only ones that we had available

were Froslass and Dragonite, who we learned Mega Froslass has Snow Warning and Mega Dragonite has Multi-Scale. I am personally excited for Froslass specifically. I think that that's a really good ability that they could give it. Okay, now let's talk about the battles. First impression, it's fun, it's really fun.

I'm really not a very visual guy, to be honest, despite what my drawing earlier would cause you to think. But one of the first things I noticed is how pretty it was. The Pokemon models look good in a way that I never really thought about before, and there's a ton of new animations

that I really appreciated. That's pretty good, right? I didn't experience all that many moves, and I already noticed a bunch that stood out to me as different from Scarlet and Violet, so I'm personally just excited to see more of the animations. There are music options from a ton of different games, but for the purposes of our experience,

pretty much only the default trainer theme was unlocked for each of them. I did check to see Gen 5 if I could find the online battle music or the tournament battle music, It wasn't there for this experience. Some Pokemon also have new icons. Like for example, Charizard has a new icon. I don't know what he's doing, but he's doing something. One new thing about the gameplay, by the way,

is that it's very fast. Like things happen really fast in game in a way that like does not happen in prior Pokemon games. There's a lot of little changes, I think, that also make the games feel faster. Like for example, drops both your opponent's attack sets at once rather than dropping one Pokemon and then the other, I think it's gonna feel a lot faster,

which I think is overall a good thing, probably. There is a downside to this, which is that turns happening faster means less time to think about your next turn on the current turn, but I'm not getting into that now. It's too speculative.

So there's a lot of new quality of life changes that make information more explicit rather than just needing to know, and I'll talk about more of these in a second, but one of the things that I noticed early on was when you press the X button to go into your Pokemon's menu, it shows you a number of different things. In Scarlet and Violet, you can use this to check how many drops a Pokemon has and how many turns of Tricker or Morayner are left, right?

That's also true in Pokemon Champions, but the thing is that in Pokemon Champions, it also shows a multiplier number, it shows 0.5. It's a clear way of communicating information that you previously simply had to know beforehand. So I think overall it's good, but here's what I noticed, okay? If your Pokemon is at minus one attack,

in Scarlet and Violet, and as far as I know every game prior, that translates to that Pokemon's attack stat being reduced to 66% of what it was before. In Pokemon Champions, the number displayed is 0.7. Now to be clear, I do not know if this is actually a change to how stat drops work. It would have pretty major implications if it was, not only for Intimidate,

which is the first thing that I thought of, but also for speed drops. It makes the math also a lot harder to do in your head. Now it is possible that this is just like a truncation thing, that it shows 70% because it's just one digit rather than 66%, which is two. Technically, okay, .7 versus .66, it's one fewer digit. That's what I'm hoping for, personally.

I think it would be really confusing to have a change to how stats operate when everything else is like pretty much carried over. I also couldn't really tell from my gameplay, I'm not familiar enough with that 4% difference. I played against Aaron Zhang and he had Max Attack, Adamant, and Cinderor, so I just am not familiar with how much that darkest layer it is doing to my Arcanine. Anyway, we'll have to see.

But there's a couple other quality of life changes that I noticed in my experience that I thought were really positive. One of the big things is that now when you go to switch out your Pokemon, This is just a really nice change to be able to see like the state of the battle from your switch menu. In the past, you just had to kind of like remember this stuff

and so like there have definitely been games where I'm like, oh, like, yeah, like I did like 30% to that Pokemon and then it comes back in and it's taken like 10% and I'm like, oh, that's not what I planned for. It feels pretty nice to be honest. Pokemon has mega evolved, even if they've been knocked out, which I really appreciate personally. I've definitely had like game three situations

where I'm pretty tired and it's late in the day and I can't remember if a Pokemon has already mega evolved or if my opponent has already, you know, terrestrialized. And so I think being able to like have the game keep track of that so you can double check at a moment's notice, overall pretty positive.

Another nice quality of life change display a lot more information than they did in the past. For example, the move Waterfall now says it has a 20% chance to flinch rather than just saying it has a chance to flinch. There's a bunch of additional explicit information listed here. For example, whether or not a move makes contact, what a move's priority is.

The move Smackdown now gives the target the landed status, which I think is like a more clear way of saying that it makes the Pokemon land on the ground and also references something called the sky high status which I imagine is for moves like fly and sky drop though I don't know if that one's coming back. Protect now tells you exactly what the chance of it failing is after consecutive uses. These are just nice quality of life changes that mean that you don't have to like go online to look up information about the game like it's nice that the game just tells you stuff that's in the game. I do have one point of concern, which I'm hoping will be fixed by the time that it launches,

which is that there was a bit of input lag. Like I would press a button or, you know, move up or down on the joystick, and like it would take a little bit longer than I would have liked for like it to reflect in the actual like gameplay.

This could be a monitor issue. too concerned about this, but yeah, like it is the one kind of negative thing that I noticed while playing is that like there was a bit of a delay. Oh, one thing that I thought was really funny is that the run button is now like, you don't have to do it from the menu. Like in the past it was like fight, you know,

switch, run, run being forfeit, right? Now, if you press minus, you think is probably good from a quality of life perspective in terms of like, oh, maybe like, you can rage quit out faster, I guess. But also like, it's really funny to me that at any point you can lose if you just press the wrong button a couple of times.

Like you don't have to just be like waiting to make a move. You can do it like middle of the turn now. I thought that was really funny. now, is the VP and the currency system in the game. Even though Aaron and I played against each other, we didn't actually earn any points, maybe because it was a casual battle rather than a ranked battle, or maybe just because this is part of the experience. But regardless, I don't know how easy it is to accrue VP.

However, what I do know is how expensive it is to change certain things about a Pokemon. Surprisingly, changing a Pokemon's stats, which in the past was the most tedious aspect of training your Pokemon, is actually the cheapest here. It seems that maxing out a stat is about 150 points, which is actually not that much. For contrast, changing a Pokemon's nature or its ability costs 500 VP. Changing a single move is 250 VP. Again, I can't comment on how expensive these are relative to how easy it is to earn VP in game, but what I can tell you is that I suspect that Pokemon Home will likely be a very cheap way to get Pokemon into the game. Having a Pokemon with the right ability and the right nature already saves you a ton of currency in game, and these are relatively easy to get in past Pokemon games, especially

when you consider that you don't need to worry about Ivies anymore. Assuming that's true, it hasn't been officially confirmed, that was my experience. Given that training a Pokemon's stats are actually relatively cheap, I think that having having Pokemon that you can bring in with the right nature, abilities, and I don't know exactly how move transfer is going to work, so I can't speak to whether or not that will be easier. But regardless, having the Pokemon, having the right ability, and having the right nature already saves you a ton of VP. If you're interested in playing Pokemon champions, I would definitely recommend thinking about which Pokemon you're excited to use and maybe getting some of them

ready into Pokemon Home so you can transfer them in. Again, I didn't experience transfer myself, so I don't know if it's expensive to transfer Pokemon in. The one thing that I did learn about Pokemon Home was after the 45 minute session of gameplay, we had an interview actually with Mr. Hoshino Masaki, who is the Game Producer and Development Director of Pokemon Champions. The one thing that I learned that I think is worth sharing is that it was confirmed that there would not be a cool down on bringing Pokemon in from Pokemon Home. So it wasn't like you could only bring one Pokemon in a day, for example. Wasn't clarified if there would be a VP cost associated with bringing Pokemon in, but I

do think that that is worth sharing nonetheless. Having had 45 minutes of the game, what I will say is that I'm very excited for it. I think it's just an exciting time to be a competitive Pokemon player in general and a Pokemon fan in general. And what I will say is that after life changes in such a short time, I think is I mean, it's not trivial.

And my overall impression is that a lot of the decision making in terms of how they were designing this game has to do with making it as easy as possible for people to play competitively. There are some things that I am sad to see go, specifically the removal of the IV system, but overall I cannot deny that these changes are being made with the health of the game in mind, and so I just can't really be that upset about it, can I?

I'm really excited to see what else I missed or wasn't present at all in the preview, and overall I'm just very excited for Champions and for Champions content. Speaking of, I have a lot of big plans for Champions content.

If you're not already subscribed, but you're interested in Pokemon Champions, I'm going to be doing a lot. It's a really interesting time for me because I just feel like I've been working towards this explicitly for a while now. Ever since I heard about it, I started putting plans in place and there's a lot of things that are kind of coming up all now as we near the release of this game. A lot of projects that I'm really excited to share with you all that I think are going to be really exciting, but also even more than that, I mean, the initial motivation for me starting my channel was to show people how cool competitive Pokemon is. And it just feels like a really full circle moment

that not only has the game grown so much, but also like now there's a game completely dedicated to competitive play. This kind of thing would have been unthinkable to me when I first started out, and honestly for like a long time

within my competitive Pokemon career. So I just think it's really special that like, yeah, we live at a time where it is a reality. Anyway, I'm curious to know what you all think about these changes and these plans. And if you want more content from me, I recommend watching the video where I ranked literally every Pokemon. I don't know how helpful this will be going into Pokemon champions, but it will be helpful

in terms of you can see me gradually lose my mind in terms of you can see me gradually lose my mind over the course of almost four hours.