Pokémon Champions can't decide if it's for newcomers or veterans |
Pokémon Champions should have been an easy victory. Take the competitive battling of your average Pokémon RPG and section it off into its own game, just like the Stadiums and Coliseums of yesterday. But judging by the free-to-play game’s early fan reception, that mission is far more complicated than it sounds. The Pokémon community is divided over absent monsters, lost items, and missing features. Depending on who you are, Champions is either a slap in the face to long-time players, a much-needed introduction to newcomers, or business as usual for the series’ competitive scene.
You could write that messy debate off as your typical community tension that haunts almost every Pokémon game these days, but doing so would be letting Champions off too easily. The confusion over what the battling game is trying to do and who it’s for stems from a messy launch clouded by mixed messaging. In trying to make a game for both newcomers and series’ veterans alike, The Pokémon Company has delivered a non-committal competitive experience that players are right to feel ambivalent about.
Even before its launch this week, it was hard to get a handle on the exact audience for Pokémon Champions. On one hand, it felt laser-targeted towards the series' most dedicated players. News that Champions was to become the standard platform for the Pokémon Video Game Championships (VGC) seemed to signal that the game would move the hardcore players with teams of painstakingly tweaked monsters to their own dedicated app. That was great news for casual players, as it raised some hope that online matches in the mainline RPGs could be freed from strict metas.
The Pokémon Company had a different idea in mind, though. In an interview with VGC, director Masaaki Hoshino stressed that the goal was to make battling more newcomer-friendly with Champions rather than create a VIP section for the top players: “With this game, I hope to expand that accessibility to make it something that anyone can jump in and enjoy.”........