As I put down the controller and sit down to write this opening paragraph, I’ve just reached the Master Ball Tier on the Regulation M-A ladder in Pokémon Champions, Game Freak’s new free-to-play dedicated competitive Pokémon battling game. Forty hours of playtime have elapsed in just over a week since the game’s April 8th launch, more than I’ve spent on the rest of the year’s brand-new releases combined (and at the time of publication, that number has shot well past 70). Those dense hours have reintroduced me to an emotional rollercoaster I have not ridden since 2016, when I experienced the fateful launch of Overwatch and then was successfully convinced to play League of Legends for six months.

When you really try to get good at a competitive pursuit, you dig things up inside yourself; you learn a fair bit about the bounds of your patience, your tolerance for tilt. Sometimes you are so frustrated at yourself the only sane play is to stop playing. But sleep on it – even just take a break for some work or a snack – and suddenly you have the greatest idea ever, ready to try against the ever-evolving monolith of faceless online opponents that make up the metagame. It’s currently rather difficult to stay away from the considerable gravity of Pokémon Champions – especially because the list of mental skills it demands does not include fast-twitch reflexes.

But this present compulsion has not simply arisen out of nowhere for me: extremely far from it. In fact in many ways, Champions is the culmination of at least fifteen years worth of personal interest in the proper competitive side of the main series Pokémon videogames, and it feels truly surreal to experience such a gigantic – if hardly perfect – payoff.

The Esport Within

The well-documented key to Pokémon’s success as the biggest media franchise in the world is its one-of-a-kind universality: this very 30th anniversary year, barely a third over, has painted a perfect picture of that power. As the Trading Card Game rides the surprisingly bountiful crest of its biggest wave in history, cosy dream-building game Pokémon Pokopia has recently and rather loudly added itself to the growing list of Nintendo Switch 2 critical / commercial darlings mere weeks after a bald-faced nostalgia push landed the 20-year old Fire Red and Leaf Green on the Switch top sellers list (but I would know absolutely nothing about that). All this while the animated TV spin-offs and exclusive merchandising collaborations continue to proliferate across every major brand imaginable, and mobile sensation Pokémon GO somehow approaches its tenth anniversary.

No matter if you’re in it for the plushes, the fancy threads, the short animated stories, the shiny cardboard, the real-world step-grinding, the button-mashing pixelated playthroughs, or the adorable post-apocalyptic friendship fables, Pokémon can kind of be whatever you want it to be. And to me, it is primarily (though by no means exclusively) a source of thrilling tactical multiplayer.

I am old enough that my Pokémon fandom started more or less on the ground level, where Game Boy link cables were a common school playground sight. For me and my friends, catching Mewtwo in Red, Blue or Yellow version was not the end of the Pokémon experience – merely a dramatic precursor to the experience of using it against a human rival. PvP was always a core part of the Pokémon videogame experience as far as I was concerned, and once Gen III arrived to a world where my siblings were old enough to play alongside me, battling became a core component of the Day 1 new-release vibe as well.