With the 2025 Pokemon World Championships in the rearview mirror, and incredible winners like Giovanni taking their awards home in glee, the rest of the planet stayed tuned until the end for what was an even bigger deal for so many of us who have been standing on the sidelines. The Pokemon Company promised something big for the closing ceremony, and now we've got it.
Not only did we get some big news in the form of the Battle Club multiplayer mode for Pokemon Legends: Z-A - here's a link for that bombshell! - but we also learned something with rather dramatic implications: rather than a traditional mainline title representing Pokemon's VGC in 2026, as they always have in the past, Pokemon Champions will take the throne.
Pokemon Champions is, ostensibly, a spinoff game. But it's a spinoff with the express purpose of providing a completely competitive experience. Whether it's because Pokemon's tenth-generation mainline games won't be out in time for the Pokemon World Championships' sunny San Francisco 2026 setting, or because Champions will well and truly be the routine representative for the tournament scene moving forward, we can now expect Pokemon Champions to be the definitive representative of...
