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While a few top end competitive options are being trimmed away in the process, competitive multiplayer Pokémon looks set to become the most accessible it has ever been for players with cognitive disabilities.
Releasing globally on April 8th 2026, Pokémon Champions is a standalone app for Nintendo Switch (and coming later this year mobile devices) which dramatically revamps online ranked competitive Pokémon gameplay, and detaches the experience from the series’ single player RPG entries.
Champions will most likely be available by the time this video is published, and will allow players to collect creatures, customise their stats, and engage in battles, theoretically without ever spending money to purchase a mainline Pokémon RPG.
While Pokémon Champions isn’t yet available at the time of writing this video script, there is a good amount of official footage of the game available online from recent preview coverage, and as such a number of changes can be seen that are interesting from an accessibility perspective.
First, for players not hugely familiar with the niche mechanics data needed to succeed at competitive Pokémon, Champions has revamped numerous areas of the battle experience to better communicate important information to players, rather than relying on players having preexisting knowledge.
When fighting against an enemy Pokémon, their health bar will now show a percentage number for their remaining health. This should make it easier to, at a glance, tell how many more uses of an attack will be needed to knock an enemy Pokémon out. While an attack’s damage is not always 100% consistent (most attacks deal damage within a slight randomised range of values), it will make estimating kill ranges easier.
Additionally, when switching out your active Pokémon for others in rotation, you can see the enemy team’s damage percentage numbers. This includes Pokémon which were out on the field during prior turns but are not currently on the field. This makes a big difference for players with memory inconsistency, helping to track the current health of enemy Pokémon that have been pulled back into reserve.
The same menu also shows you if one of the Pokémon on the enemy team’s bench has mega evolved so far in the match, and if they still have HP left. While this will be somewhat useful in best of one single elimination matches, it will be particularly useful in best of three tournament settings, lessening the risk of mistakenly remembering a mega evolution occurring on a specific team in round 2 of a match, and thinking that the memory was from a mega evolution in round 3, and then not realising that they still have their Mega left to use.
Pokémon Champions features a number of tutorials designed to teach mechanics that are not always terribly well explained to casual players of the main series RPGs. An example, tutorials teach players about the difference between contact and non contact moves, or the physical and special attack and defense split.
When selecting your moves, either in the Pokémon customisation menu or the in battle attack menu, players are now given a lot more granular specific information about exactly how commonly occurring side effects on moves are, and how likely they are likely to work in practice.
This newly expanded information includes telling players what percentage chance a move has to inflict poison, what percentage chance Protect has to fail if used on consecutive turns, and how many stages of priority an attack has (which determines if it gets to activate ahead of naturally faster Pokémon’s moves).
Lastly, moves which increase or decrease stats on a Pokémon still show how many stages the stat level has been impacted by, but also now show a multiplication number for what that stat change means in real world terms. Players will, for example, no longer need to inherently know that a 4 stage attack stat increase translates to a 3X modifier on damage dealt.
Moving from information presentation to team building, Pokémon Champions will have the option for players to either import Pokémon caught in main series titles, or recruit Pokémon on a temporary or permanent basis to play with from a randomised pool of options.
Perhaps the biggest change made to Pokémon Champions compared to prior competitive Pokémon gameplay formats is that, from all accounts, it seems like Pokémon Champions is doing away with IVs, or Individual Values. These have historically been invisible stats that, behind the scenes, make two Pokémon of the same level and species feel different to use in battle. If you were to catch two wild Pikachu at level 5, and one had a higher speed IV, that one would by default attack first in fights. While these stats could be changed using late game RPG items such as Bottle Caps, the system was invisible to most players and a bit of a barrier to some players picking up competitive gameplay.
While removing IVs from Pokémon will make it easier for many players to jump into the competitive scene, it will unfortunately negatively impact the options available to top end competitive players. Certain strategies used by high level players involve running Pokémon with deliberately low IV stats (such as teams using Trick Room to make slow Pokémon attack first, favouring deliberately low speed IVs). This also increases the odds of two Pokémon of the same species potentially experiencing a speed tie, a situation where which of two Pokémon attacks first comes down to random chance
The next part of customising a Pokémon is EVs, or Effort Values. In the main series Pokémon games EVs are stats that your Pokémon gains based on the types of Pokémon that they fight against, or by consuming specific items. To tweak these in the main series games requires a lot of specialist knowledge such as how high an individual stat can be increased, how much each stat is increased by each method, and how to reset these invisible stats down to 0 before trying to craft a specific build. Most casual players have no idea that the Pokémon species that they’re battling against while levelling up are invisibly increasing specific stats behind the scenes, that may or may not be optimal for their Pokémon’s build.
In Champions, players can simply use a visual slider to set their Pokémon’s EVs manually, tweaking them up or down at will. This will need to be where top end players attempt to define the stats that make their Pokémon different from their opponents.
Pokémon also have something called a Nature, which basically causes one of their stats to increase more quickly than usual, and one stat to raise more slowly. These can be easily changed in Champions via a menu. Your chosen nature will bestow or take away bonus stat points at various EV thresholds, which are now clearly shown on the EV training slider.
Lastly, abilities (which generally offer passive buffs or debuffs to a Pokémon) and Moves that a Pokémon can learn can also be manually altered from a menu. Previously some moves that a Pokémon could learn were hidden behind secretive invisible mechanics, for example egg moves which could only be passed down to a species via breeding chains. In Champions it seems like egg moves can now be learned like any other move in the customisation menu, reducing some of the obfuscation inherent in those mechanics.
Moves also seemingly have their Power Points (PP) by default maxed out, meaning that a move can be used as many times as possible in one battle, without having to go into the main series games and find items to maximise that number. While some moves have had their maximum number of uses rebalanced, this generally should remove another step of potential complexity from team building.
It remains to be seen whether Pokémon that are brought over from main series games will be normalised, or if for example you could deliberately bring a below max PP version of a move to the new game, or deliberately bring a 0 Speed IV creature and just not have acces to tweak its IVs in Champions.
While I do think that, generally speaking, the changes made to simplify Pokémon stat selection and alteration are going to be very positive, there is a caveat to go along with that praise – monetisation.
For a long time, Pokémon battle simulators such as Pokémon Showdown have existed online which allow, like Champions, the ability to simply tweak a Pokémon’s moves and stats via sliders rather than in-game RPG mechanics. The difference is that, while Pokémon Showdown is entirely free, Pokémon Champions is a “free to play” game.
Players will need to use a currency called VP, or Victory Points, to pay for altering their Pokémon’s stats, nature, moves and more, with it unclear at present how much of a grinding process that will ultimately be to gain.
From everything shown prior to release, it seems like VP will not be possible to directly pay real world money to unlock. Players will be able to pay real money for a “starter pack” costing $9.99 USD that will, for example, come bundled with 50 training tickets (which we assume will pay for a Pokémon to have all of its stats fully altered in one go), so there is some degree of ability to spend real money rather than earning VP in game, and as such we want to be cautious about what that level grind is like.
We also don’t know if transferring Pokémon from other games into Champions will come with a VP cost as well.
In practice, it’ll entirely depend on how easy it is to earn VP through online battles. If it’s not too much of a grind this might be alright, but it is an aspect of the game that I know poses an accessibility concern for some disabled players with impulse control impacting disabilities.
With the monetisation issue set aside for a moment, one last accessibility benefit for Pokémon Champions is that a lot of the attack animations in the game seem to have been made faster than those seen in the main RPG titles. This will, to some degree, be useful for players with conditions such as ADHD. While players will still need to wait for their opponent to make their choice of move, the actual attack animation phase should be a lot faster. On the flip side, there will be a little less thinking time available as a result between rounds to consider upcoming moves.
I plan to have further accessibility focused coverage of Pokémon Champions posted in the coming days, once I’ve had some time to go hands on with the game myself, and get a sense for its monetisation strategy. I am also aiming to start streaming ranked gameplay over on Twitch, to see if I’ve got what it takes to take competitive Pokémon seriously in this new format.
Fingers crossed that the monetisation, in practice, feels less predatory than Pokémon Unite did…
God, there were so many pop ups any time I opened that game, trying to get me to spend money.
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