Good doesn’t mean perfect,the game released in a bare bones state and with a lot of problems,but the most important part is that it works and its fun.
The Great tusk in the room
I will start with a list of negatives because they are plenty and hard to ignore.
- No 6vs6 singles in private rooms is a crime,that’s all.
- The game has performance issues even on switch 2.(specially on there as it was on a lower resolution on release.)
- 4 Pokemon are locked behind legends Z-A,one of them is one of the strongest mons in the meta.
- Not all Pokemon are included on release,so there is no reason to play private matches anyway.
- Terrible item selection on release,who invited bright powder and kings rock?.
- Bugs,the important ones like mega priority are fixed but some remain.
- No custom tours,gen 7 feature.
- No rental teams,you need to have the mons to make the team.
- The price in VP for moveset changes is absurd.
- Why are bots here beyond beginner rank???
- Modern Pokemon art style syndrome,this time the game looks like a McDonald toy.
- No voice acting?This was in the old games…
- why are some menus websites???
- Horrible UI,just look at it.
I think that’s all(It wasn’t,sorry),that’s a lot of bad but unlike all the other terrible Pokemon switch games this is all fixable,its not like a single player game where the game design is ruined.
The only con that really pisses me of is eternal-floette as a pay to win mon,you need legends Z-A to get it and the mega stone,horrible,why,the monetization in this game doesn’t matter after a week of playing besides this and the box size,why.I know the gen 6 starters are locked too but obtaining them without the game is not terrible,and the only good one is delphox,who is not mandatory,but eternal floette is one of the strongest megas in the game…
lets move to a more positive note.
Battle tendencies
It took me so long to write this post that I had to rewrite this entire section ):
We finally have a new battle game!In terms of content there is nothing of interest besides official VGC but I guess we can see everything else real quick:
BBS
As expected,the official singles format since 1997 is here,and it’s just as boring and uninteresting as ever.If you know what mons to bring in your team and solve the meta you should win every time besides other people that figured out the 3 broken mons that counter the entire meta and force at least a 1vs1,the rest is just your defensive glue mons,you bring one of them if your opponent has something that requires them,maybe change one of the glue mons for a gimmick to catch the opponent off guard and you have a team,its been like this since 1997 and every year it gets worse as game freak no longer cares about this format,for now its fine because megamence is not in the game but just wait.And if you don’t feel like waiting you have mimikyu.
The games are way too quick and unlike in VGC you don’t have the strategic depth to do anything interesting(The only times you can you really wish you couldn’t),luckily no one takes this seriously besides a small and very dedicated Japanese playerbase so you don’t have to play this.
And yes,this is the everything else,private matches are nonexistent because you can only play the official formats,and friendlies are just people testing competitive teams.
VGC
Playing doubles is the best way of playing competitive Pokemon unless you enjoy long games like me(or play Gen 8 LC,best tier),you can get a bunch of matches quick witch is very important in IRL tournaments and fun long sessions of laddering.(As opposed to the horrible grind of most singles ladders)
The format is really fun with four exceptions,aerodactyl,kingambit,basculegion and sneasler,I use them on my team,you should too.
Aerodactyl speed tier,versatility,utility,the chance to just flinch the opponent,the fact that it can be focus,kings rock,or mega,it lives a blizzard under sand btw.Its just so good,the only reason everyone is not on every team its the fact that its not a glue mon you can stick everywhere like incin,but its super strong
Sneasler beats what are in theory the two best mons in the game,incineroar and mega-floette,has fake out,hits like a truck,has a cheating move with a 30% chance to cripple something that murders fairies,and has unburden for massive speed.Crazy strong,always does the same thing and you can’t do anything about it,this doesn’t mean that you can get creative and use upper hand or something,but for the most part it does the thing and all you can do is react.
Kingambit is the same cheater it is in smogon singles,you just lead with it instead of keeping it in the back,it does the same game stealing it usually does,who tough bisharp needed an evolution when it was good enough?
Basculegion is super bulky and has a 150 base power stab with no drawbacks if you keep it on the back,choice scarf makes it fast and focus guarantees someone dies,immune to most fake outs and hit like a nuke under rain.
The other strong Pokemon in the game are also absurd but not broken,the closest thing to a broken mon besides those 4 are mega-floette hitting like harder than xerneas,surprisingly balanced because sneasler exist,and archaludon who steals money the moment it rains thanks to his custom move and OC stats.
Everything else is way weaker,besides some not so but still broken beast like mega-delphox,t-tar,and chomper everything else is way weaker,witch means that you will probably have to use a bunch lower powered mon to round out the team,that’s great,having few very centralizing threats and a ton of interesting niche choices is the best way to balance a game like Pokemon.
The item selection also helps with the lower power level of the game,the limited item choices are great besides the ones i mentioned in the negatives,this lets teams with two megas and weakness berries shine,its the best of gen 4 VGC with what the previous mega formats should have been.
The fact that VGC is finally accessible without hacking is great and I’m having so much fun!Speaking of that…
Train and recruit
If you don’t have Pokemon home and a bunch of Pokemon from back when the main games were good,you can obtain them via recruiting,its a gacha were you choose one of the mons that you pull,this could be fine if sneasler wasn’t a god and required,you have to get creative and use scraps until you get them,luckily if you are good this shouldn’t be a massive problem as even the worst starting rental team is workable into something ultra ball worthy,but once you get there you have to spend any resource you get to get the top mons you are still missing,so its way less bad than a regular gacha but it still sucks.
you can also bring Pokemon from Pokemon home in a very annoying process,if you have any useful mon you should probably there you should use this to circumvent the poor box size.
Training in this game is easy and once you get the ball rolling you can change whatever you want in your team,IV’s no longer exist and EV’s have been streamlined in a bizarre way that makes unorthodox EV spreads more common because if you aren’t going all in into two stats there is always an unintuitive way to make the most of your EV’s and nature.(or maybe this was always the chase in VGC and level 50 formats,I don’t remember)
Changing attacks is very expensive but besides that its very inexpensive to tune everything else,too bad movesets are the thing you want to change the most.
The worst part of the game is the storage,you can only have 50 Pokemon,and that’s only if you are good enough like me to hit master ball rank,no pressure,just figure out a way to win quickly when you probably don’t know much about the game and are figuring out what you should do,good luck with the 30 Pokemon you can get early on.
Other stuff
The game has some sort of story,a cool but unnecessary addition,the intro cinematic is beautiful,even if it features mons that aren’t in the game like dozo.But after that its just a diagetic tutorial into a cutscene that unlocks boxes…Sad and wasteful.
The tutorials are kinda nonsense because they make you use moves in situations were you never use them and are just a glorified cinematic that you can only skip if you have a turbo controller,as they cannot teach you how to play a game as complex as Pokemon in just a bunch of tutorials.
All of this is fixable by replacing both things with a short story mode composed of battles where they just show you common strategies like sunroom or rain,you use a leased team and your opponent has a different one,hard AI for the final two and make sure that using mechanics like status is required to win,for example,a team full of physical attackers with priority,your team is way too squishy to win but you have mega-scovillain to rage powder burn.
The free to play experience
This is the first,and probably the last time besides another game i will be talking about shortly,that i will be typing about a free to play mobile game,and that is because a competitive duel simulator like this one basically need to be a live service in order to pay the bills,the only exception are fanmade sims,but those will never have the budget to have decent graphics and console ports,not only that but they are unofficial,witch means that they can be hit with a cease and desist at a moments notice.
Now,comparing this game with showdown is unfair because it has been in development for over 15 years,and its a fan project that’s not for profit,comparing it to the TCG client is also unfair because the TCG live client is a glorified marketing campaign for the most profitable card game ever,lead by a side branch of the company,with basically no budget and no hopes of making any money back,and with 0 official tournaments because you are supposed to buy the physical cards and play in real live(also it kinda sucks).
so instead i will compare it with Yu-gi-oh master duel,the best official dueling sim for any game ever made,and the only one that mostly killed any unofficial sim,Master duel had four years in the oven but its mostly the same as released,i will ignore all of the bells,whistles and new modes added to make this a fair comparative,this also mean i will compare the economy of this game with release date master duel,not like it has gotten any better or worse,there is only a marginal bump in the expense of making new decks because half of it are ultra rares,but because of the way the game works that doesn’t really matter.
looks and feel
Master duel wins by a landslide,granted,it didn’t need that many animations,but taking in consideration the fact that its not part of the biggest franchise in the planet,and the fact that all of the assets of the game besides card art were made from scratch,including the new dueling engine inside unity,i think its a fair compaction.
A thing that Pokemon masters is missing is focus and art direction,the new trainers they show of in the story mode are great but you only see the ugly ass kid that for some reason is a mainstay of most of the switch era games(at least its not a baby like in Sca/Vio)and the receptionist,why bother having humans in the game?to sell cosmetics?if that’s the case then why can’t i change the field,or something else that i see during battle like the shininess of my Pokemon?
Another problem is that even with all the speed ups the game can feel too slow,i suspect this is the reason why singles 6vs6 is not in,Yu-gi-oh matches can take ages even if its just 2 turns and the game understands this by making animations minimal and clean,having an option to remove animations like in the old games and only queue against people with animations turned of would be great.
Old money vs Goldhengo
The monetization of master duel is absurdly generous,to the point its futureproofed,and the biggest source of income for the player doesn’t even rely on them being particularly good,the only way you run out of resources and are forced to play is if you are completely oblivious to the meta,good deckbulding and the admittedly badly designed store,and all of that only stops you for 15 days max as the moment an event comes you have access to enough gems to build anything but the most expensive deck in the game history,this is all assuming the worst chase scenario.
The battle pass can be obtained even if you are a free to play player and if you complete it,which you will because they last an infamously long amount of time(they reduced the duration and it still last like 3 months)you get a full refund of the gems you spend,on top of the cosmetics and all the crafting resources.
This combined with a crafting system that lets you get any card if you dust off 3 of any other card in the same rarity means that paying to play the game is a suggestion rather than an obligation,and a really bad one at that.
To be honest,if it wasn’t for the box space and the fact that you have to be good to play f2p,the monetization of this game could be the best in any free to play game ever,the in game currency is NOT available for purchase at all,in master duel it might as well be but if you are very weak to gambling and just need to open cards even if you don’t need them,or you make a lot of horrible decisions+horrible luck and you don’t want to wait for the next event,i could see some people spending.
The in game currency rewards are generous even after the begging if you are good as you get a bunch of it for winning,you probably wanted to do at least 5 matches daily anyway if you enjoy the game,and the free battle pass gives you a lot just for playing too.
The big wall for most people comes at the end of super ball/ultra ball rank,your box is tiny and you need more mons to experiment because you can’t get a winstreak big enough to get out,if you change your team a lot you burn points training and getting new mons just to finally find the winning formula for you,you start making tough choices as all of the Pokemon you have in your box are at least decently good and are forced to specialize in one teamstyle,but you aren’t sure yet.Because you don’t get wins you aren’t even breaking even and it gets very stressful as every time you hop on ladder you are afraid of getting a lose streak that will send you swimming with the basculegions.
Dropping ranks before masterball sucks a lot because it digs you more,it puts you further away from the extra box space you sorely need to breathe.
Tournaments alleviate the pressure because they give you a free decent mon and a way to farm currency without dropping rank but you wont get too much of it if you still lose way over half of your games.This basically makes the game free to start unless you know how to play beforehand or you had Pokemon home and a bunch of games already.
The game also features no way to have real fun with your friends as the private rooms are basically current meta because of the limited Pokemon pool and lack of 6vs6,in master duel,even on release you could make a pseudo GOAT format room and play with your friends,in fact,one of the most popular ways to play the game during its first two years was only using normal and rare cards,cheap,easier than modern Yu-gi-oh without dumbing down the game,and literally free as there is no mathematical way to run out of N/R dust if you use your daily login gems,the fact that i am saying this about master duel,a game infamous for pushing only one way to play should say something.
The competitive home
Pokemon champions only lets you play on official tournaments and ladder,you can’t make your own online tours like in sun and moon and you can’t spectate matches,there is no way to practice your plays or test your team to see if you forgot something important or if an interaction works the way you think,there is no way to save replays to analyze them later,you can’t host online tours because there is no way to spectate a mach and there is no way in game to see other players playing the game.
literally none of this was a problem when master duel released,the only thing is that you have to test against bots with predefined decks so its not ideal at all but that’s better than nothing.
Other modes
They both drop the ball here,but master duel is way better because it has a real solo mode besides a bunch of tutorials,this is release day so all the good ones aren’t here but at least you can have fun if you hate competitive gaming and don’t have a friend online right now.
Again,its release day so you don’t have a great tutorial that teaches you how to play the structure deck you just got for asking for a code on the internet,both games fail to teach you anything remotely useful,but at least you can practice with the solo mode bots in master duel.
Obviously master duel is not as fun as Pokemon champions because its a Yu-gi-oh sim(eeew),but that’s not the fault of the simulator ,rather the game it lets you play,the fact that i still play master duel semi regularly after the official Pokemon card game client,one finally made in japan with a real budget and with supervision of the real Pokemon company,and this game really says something about the lack of quality of every other dueling sim,master duel ate MtG arena and the other Pokemon TCG sim for breakfast and i am still waiting for any company to finally release me from the Yu-gi-oh mystic mines…
In conclusion
This game is fun because its competitive Pokemon and kinda bad because it was made by the Pokemon guys,i don’t care if its ILCA or GameFreak,the moment you have the Pokemon company breathing down your neck you turn into the worst developer ever,i always dreamed of monolith soft making a Pokemon game but after what happened in the switch era I’m not sure anymore.
Pokemon champions is also fully free to play if you already owned Pokemon home and another Pokemon game,if you don’t i cannot recommend this beyond the first week or so,but if you already had both this is probably the best turn based,non mystery dungeon Pokemon game since Black and White 2,that’s sad…
