After half a year of rumors and leaks, we’ve finally gotten our first look at Pokémon Champions, a brand new multiplayer battle-focused Pokémon game being developed in a collaboration between Game Freak and The Pokémon Works, which itself is a recent joint venture between The Pokémon Company and Pokémon Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl developer ILCA.
Pokémon Champions is a game focused on Pokémon 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 Pokémon battles.
Additionally, Pokémon Champions will connect with Pokémon Home, allowing players to transfer Pokémon from all other games to battle in it and finally giving fans something to do with the hundreds of Pokémon just sitting in their boxes from past generations.
Pokémon 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 Pokémon games.
Pokémon Champions appears to be the same as Pokémon 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, Pokémon 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 Pokémon 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 rvalentine@ign.com.
