After half a year of rumors and leaks, we’ve finally gotten our first look at Pokemon Champions, a brand new multiplayer battle-focused Pokemon game being developed in a collaboration between Game Freak and The Pokemon Works, a recent joint venture between The Pokemon Company and Pokemon Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl developer ILCA.
Pokemon Champions is a game focused on Pokemon battles, which features the series “core-style battles” and allows players to battle online with one another. From the trailer, we’ve seen it will definitely include both Mega Evolution and Terastalization, and the reveal suggested it will canvas all different types and eras of Pokemon battles.
Additionally, Pokemon Champions will connect with Pokemon Home, allowing players to transfer Pokemon from all other games to battle in it and finally giving fans something to do with the hundreds of Pokemon just sitting in their boxes from past generations.
Pokemon Champions is “now in development” for both Nintendo Switch and mobile, but did not get a release date. It will be playable in Latin American Spanish at launch in addition to other languages previously available in Pokemon games.
Pokemon Champions appears to be the same as Pokemon Synapse, a game that first leaked last year as part of the larger “Freak Leak” that saw tons of internal Game Freak info drop online, including unreleased games, meeting notes, Pokemon designs, and more. At the time, the most firm details we had were that it was being co-developed by Game Freak and ILCA, while everything else seemed to be a work-in-progress and a bit speculative. Those who looked into the leak suggested it was a multiplayer game of some kind and some compared it to Splatoon, but that comparison seems to have been slightly off.
You can catch up on everything else we saw at today’s Pokemon Presents right here.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
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