Like many live-service games before it, Pokémon Champions’ launch has been messy. The free-to-start battle sim, which is out now on the Switch and Switch 2 (and also coming to mobile later this year), is plagued with bugs, some of which cause issues with basic battle mechanics — not great for a game that’s only about battling. But bugs can be fixed, and encouragingly, some of them already have been. Champions’ bigger problem is that, in trying to be a competitive battling platform for all kinds of players, it risks satisfying none of them.

Coming hot on the heels of Pokopia, a creative and cozy spinoff with no battling whatsoever, Champions is the complete opposite. There’s no real single-player story; you just get some pokémon, you make a team, and then you battle other players. Other than the satisfaction of ranking up, battling really just gets you in-game currency that you can use to get more pokémon and items so you can keep battling. And if you’re serious about battling, Champions will soon be the game used in official in-person tournaments, including this year’s World Championships.

So, in other words, Champions is for the real battle sickos. I am one such sicko, and I’ve been mostly enjoying Champions so far, bugs aside — battling at this level is a consistently fun and satisfying challenge, and those fundamentals haven’t changed. But Champions also takes some big steps to make battling more approachable, and that’s where the tension lies. 

It’s not that approachability is a bad thing. Competitive Pokémon battling has sorely needed it. The official competitive circuit for the video games, known as VGC, has a notoriously high skill ceiling and, until recently, an even higher barrier to entry: A decade ago, it took hours of grinding to acquire and train a single pokémon for a six-pokémon VGC team. VGC has steadily grown in the last few years, thanks in part to a drip feed of quality-of-life tweaks that have made getting and training usable pokémon a lot quicker and easier than it used to be.

Champions streamlines this process even further, and I was able to whip up my first workable team in a matter of minutes, by far the most painless team-building experience I’ve had in my decade-plus in VGC. Part of that is because Champions takes previously obfuscated information, like how many stat points you’ve allocated when training a pokémon, and lays it out clearly. That’s a major improvement, and it benefits veterans as much as it does newcomers.

But it was only that easy for me to build a team because I already had all the pokémon I needed to begin with. I have over 2,500 pokémon stored in Pokémon Home, the franchise’s cloud storage app, and even more in Scarlet and Legends: Z-A that I haven’t yet transferred. The shiny Sylveon I caught in Scarlet three years ago was fully trained and ready to go, and all I had to do was move it to Pokémon Home and then send it to Champions from there. 

If someone else wanted to copy how I trained my Sylveon, they’d first need to get their own Sylveon in Champions. This part is not easy or streamlined. New players coming to Champions without years’ worth of pokémon stashed in Pokémon Home have to rely on the game’s gacha-style “recruit” feature, which presents you with a random lineup of pokémon from a larger list and lets you pick one to either temporarily or permanently add to your collection. Recruiting more than once per day costs in-game currency, as does permanently recruiting a pokémon. So on top of having to grind out battles to earn more currency, if you wanted to use Sylveon but didn’t have one already, you’d also have to rely on luck to get it.

That’s not newcomer-friendly at all. Champions does attempt to make some concessions to avoid overwhelming new players, though — they just aren’t necessarily helpful. The pool of held items at launch, for example, is missing a majority of the most important items in VGC, while also including items that have no practical use at all: There’s no Throat Spray, an item I’d usually run on Sylveon to increase its damage after using the move Hyper Voice, but the item shop does have the Oran Berry, a weak early-game healing item that no one would ever use when the superior Sitrus Berry is right there. This does nothing to help onboard new VGC players, who are now more likely to pick a worthless item that puts them at a disadvantage. And it’s also frustrating for experienced players who start playing Champions with a team already in mind, only to realize that most of their favorite tools are absent.

Making competitive Pokémon more approachable is great for the health of the game and its growing community, but only if Champions can do so without alienating its core base of dedicated competitive players. Right now, the battle sim is caught between those players and brand-new ones, and it’s lacking on both ends of the spectrum. But it’s not doomed. It’s a live-service game, after all, and it’s clear that more items, pokémon, and features are planned for the future. Champions has the bones of a game that can dramatically change the competitive scene for the better, but that all depends on how it manages to strike that balance going forward.

Pokémon Pokopia features, of all things, a 3D printer. I wasn’t sure why this surprised me so much, given all the other high-tech gear in pretty much every Pokémon game. But I was not expecting to find, inside the once-crumbling Pokémon Center I’d just worked hard to restore, a kind of machine I’d never seen before.

Until Pokopia, I hadn’t spent much time thinking about tech in the Pokémon world. I’ve been Pokémon-pilled for so long that I took all its sci-fi technology for granted. Sure, there are magic PCs that can digitally store living creatures — that’s how it’s always been. Obviously fossils can be resurrected and obviously sometimes pokémon can travel through time. These are just facts. The power of science is amazing.

Pokopia is different. In this world, humans are long gone, and pokémon are slowly repopulating the ruins left in their wake. Here, technology is not guaranteed to work. Climate change has led to widespread environmental disasters, and as a result, pokémon have been safely stored in PCs for some time. But a collectible journal entry reveals that the PC storage system can’t keep working without regular maintenance, and it seems that explains what’s been happening: The pokémon are showing up now because the storage system has finally failed. That fallibility made me pay closer attention to the technology in Pokopia — and see the high-tech world of Pokémon in a new light.

There is still a lot of sci-fi and fantasy in Pokopia, in more than a few ways. (Least among them: The PC outside the dilapidated Pokémon Center, which is not for storing pokémon but for tracking your restoration efforts in the surrounding area, still works somehow.) But ordinary, real-life objects you can find throughout the world — lamps, TVs, vending machines, arcade cabinets — often need electricity to work, and more of it than electric-type pokémon can reasonably provide on their own. That means building some significant power infrastructure; magical Pokémon technology can only get you so far. 

You can’t take these kinds of devices for granted in Pokopia because using them takes real effort. As you work to rebuild the world, you have to create homes for pokémon to live in. Sometimes this just means growing a flowerbed, but in a lot of cases, you have to acquire “old” human technology and supply it with electricity in order to make a proper pokémon habitat. You might need to get power to a vending machine to fulfill a pokémon’s request, or power the lights in their house so they aren’t sitting sadly in the dark. To do this, you have to set up utility poles and enough power generators to supply all the electronics on your grid — and this takes time, resources, and planning. 

What happened to the humans is best left unspoiled, but suffice it to say that it’s very much science fiction. In that way, some things about Pokopia feel like a distant, apocalyptic future, and then you turn around and build a regular ol’ windmill to generate electricity. The Pokémon-specific fantasy elements are there, too, but exist alongside run-of-the-mill and even largely outdated tech. There’s a new version of Rotom — the pokémon that can occupy appliances to change its form — who has possessed a stereo and is a DJ, but you have to find physical compact discs so DJ Rotom can play music for you. 

The dichotomy between ordinary and futuristic tech makes Pokopia feel stuck out of time. How long has it been since the humans disappeared? How much time has passed since the events of the main series games? Why, in this world where you can put living beings into the computer, are we using CDs to play music? 

Caught between the sci-fi tech and the game’s normal everyday devices is the 3D printer. It’s in its own category: not purely contemporary, not a far-off evolution of real-life technology, but something almost within reach. Take out your Pokédex’s camera, toggle the setting for reference photos, and take a picture of basically any object; now you can use that photo and some rare materials to 3D print a copy of it. It’s more advanced than in real life, but it doesn’t take much imagination to get there.

Pokémon gadgets have reflected real-life ones going back as far as the series does, but they’ve mainly been handhelds (and sometimes wearables) that fulfill menu functions and provide information. The original Pokédex is essentially a ’90s PDA with a pokémon database in it; Gold and Silver’s Pokégear is a sort of flip phone that can take calls and access the radio; Diamond and Pearl’s Pokétch is an early smartwatch with a ton of simple apps, including a calculator for some reason. The recent games’ Rotom phones, too, are pretty much just real-life smartphones, albeit possessed by a pokémon that can provide some unique features.

These are the kinds of devices I expect from Pokémon, alongside the matter-of-fact “this is possible because pokémon can do it” tech and the true speculative fiction stuff. I did not expect something quite as current, yet not as mainstream, as a 3D printer. 

It’s possible that at some point in the past 30 years there has been a piece of Pokémon tech along these same lines. I know a lot about Pokémon, but I’m not an encyclopedia. While advanced tech has always been a part of Pokémon, it wasn’t until I discovered the 3D printer that I finally pieced it all together, and then everything about Pokopia’s tech clicked. In the rough timeline in my head, the 3D printer placed Pokopia quite a few years after CDs — maybe it wasn’t that humans had inexplicably advanced in everything except for music distribution, but that there were some technologies that did not survive the climate disaster. When there’s no internet left to stream music on, CDs become pretty important again.

High-tech PCs and 3D printing materials are precious commodities in Pokopia, but so are CDs and power lines. They’re all part of rebuilding the world, because the world of Pokémon has always relied on a mix of the everyday and the fantastical. I just didn’t realize it until that world had been taken down to the studs and shown me something I hadn’t seen before.

I never felt done with my Animal Crossing: New Horizons island. Despite playing every day for two years, and racking up 1,700 hours of playtime, I somehow never finished decorating. I had plenty of ideas for my island, sure, but actually implementing them was another story: The decorating and terraforming systems that helped make New Horizons a huge success are also slow, manual, and cumbersome, and my patience for decorating and redecorating had finally worn thin. 

Fast-forward a few years, and a very much unexpected update is coming to finally fix some of those pain points. Update 3.0 is launching on January 15th, 2026, alongside the Switch 2 Edition of New Horizons. And while the paid Switch 2 upgrade has some nice-to-haves (like Joy-Con 2 mouse controls for indoor decorating), it’s the free update that brings all the key new features.

I recently attended a virtual preview for the New Horizons upgrade and update, and there are two caveats: I have not yet played either the Switch 2 version or the new free content myself, and it’s hard to gauge the quality of the Switch 2 version’s visual and performance improvements over a Zoom call. (I still have some unanswered questions about the biggest performance issues on the original Switch, like the choppy frame rate on more densely decorated islands.) But seeing the 3.0 additions in action, it was easy to imagine myself finishing my island — or at least an island.

As shown in the October announcement trailer, update 3.0 makes much-needed quality-of-life fixes. You’ll finally be able to craft multiple items at once, and crafting will pull materials from your overall storage instead of your pockets, meaning you won’t have to do a bunch of inventory management just to craft some decor. Then there’s Resetti’s Reset Service, which can help you clean up entire sections of your island instantly so you don’t have to pick everything up individually in order to redecorate. Some players also noticed a very subtle but potentially impactful change to movement while terraforming that should hopefully make it a smoother process. And then, as if to show off those decorating improvements, Nintendo also added Slumber Islands.

Not to be confused with dreams, New Horizons’ online island-sharing feature, Slumber Islands are extra sandboxes for you to decorate and play with, where you can set the time of day and the weather and magically conjure up any item you have in your in-game catalog to decorate with, similar to the Happy Home Paradise DLC. You can build bridges and inclines instantly by talking to Lloid, rather than going through Tom Nook and waiting (or time traveling) a day. And while it seems like terraforming works the same on Slumber Islands, the apparent addition of strafing while terraforming — instead of having to constantly reorient yourself manually — should help at least a little bit. (It’s the first thing I’m going to test on January 15th, that’s for sure.)

For me, the worst part of decorating in New Horizons was having an idea, ordering all the furniture I’d need for it over the course of days, testing out the design, realizing it did not look the way I envisioned, and facing the tedious process of breaking it all down and starting over again brick by brick — or, at the very least, having to push and pull objects around for a while to see if I could make it work. The design process I saw on Nintendo’s Slumber Island during the preview, meanwhile, seemed quicker and smoother. Trying out an idea or aesthetic in that environment doesn’t sound like such a tall order.

Without any hands-on time, I can’t say if it will actually be noticeably easier to design and decorate with the 3.0 update. But I’m excited by the idea that I can go to my Slumber Island scratch pad and try out my designs before committing to them (and the cost in bells to get it all done) on my main island. And maybe, if I really like how it feels to decorate, I’ll make an entire Halloween-themed Slumber Island — the kind of island I’ve wanted to make for years but never did on my main island, where the seasons continue to change and actively ruin the vibe.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A hadn’t been out even a few hours before the tweets started rolling in: Shiny pokémon don’t despawn. You can walk away from a shiny, and it’ll still be there when you come back. 

To shiny collectors, this is big news. In other Pokémon games, like Scarlet and Violet, pokémon despawn after you get a certain distance away from them or trigger a loading screen. I’ve missed out on my fair share of shiny pokémon this way, my heart sinking as I spotted them right before they disappeared forever. 

You can still miss out on shiny pokémon in Z-A, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

I first discovered the new spawning mechanics myself. I heard the sparkly sound effect that signals a shiny, spotted an oddly colored Swirlix on top of a roof, and realized I had no way to get up to that roof without walking very far away. Not knowing any better, I figured I was just out of luck. (This Swirlix had a one in 4,096 chance of being shiny, so I guess I had some luck.)

I did try to get up to the roof, but night was about to change to day — which triggers a mini cutscene that I was sure would despawn the Swirlix — and I was in a hurry. I tried to take a shortcut through the adjacent Battle Zone. It was full of trainers ready to challenge me on sight, though, and I ended up in a battle immediately. I hadn’t forfeited one of these battles before, so I tried that, thinking maybe I’d get out of the battle and up a ladder in time to catch the shiny Swirlix… and ended up magically transported to a faraway Pokémon Center. If the night-to-day change wasn’t enough to despawn the Swirlix, I thought, surely that would do it.

A bit later, I was on some rooftops heading to an objective when I heard the shiny sound effect again. I realized it was the same Swirlix, an Alpha, still there and still shiny. I immediately messaged my colleague Charles Pulliam-Moore, who reviewed Z-A for The Verge, half in disbelief. I thought at first it was only because the Swirlix was an Alpha, since certain Alphas always spawn in the same locations. But after launch, players and other websites quickly reported that persistent shiny spawns apply to all shinies.

There are some exceptions, though. Charles and I were chatting about this new spawning mechanic, and he sent me a clip of a shiny Patrat he’d encountered — and which he’d barely spotted before it ran away from his character and disappeared into the ether. Patrat is one of a handful of very skittish pokémon that will flee when you get too close, and the process of fleeing does despawn the pokémon in question, even if it’s shiny.

That also applies to any shiny pokémon you’ve defeated in battle but failed to catch, which isn’t great news for pokémon with lower catch rates. For those, you’ll have to rely on saving — and you can’t disable autosave in Z-A, unlike in other recent Pokémon games. That sounds bad, but I’ve found that the autosave doesn’t trigger too frequently as long as you don’t fast-travel to a new location or catch a pokémon. It should still be possible to save right before battling a shiny and reload that save if you knock it out.

Fleeing pokémon aside, the new shiny spawning mechanics are great for a game so heavy on roundabout, vertical, on-foot exploration. The shinies have to stay in one place because reaching a pokémon in order to catch it isn’t always as simple as walking over to it. Sometimes you have to run around looking for a ladder, or get past a lot of other people who want to fight you, or run away from a wild pokémon that’s about to knock you out. It’s a relief knowing that most shiny pokémon will be waiting for you to reach them on your own terms.

I recently did something sort of unusual: I went to a preview event for a game that’s been out for almost three years.

I’ve played around 400 hours of Pokémon Scarlet, according to my Nintendo Switch, since it was released in late 2022. It’s safe to say I know the game pretty well. And yet, when I was invited to preview Pokémon Scarlet and Violet on the Nintendo Switch 2 ahead of the new console’s launch, I gladly took the opportunity to see three-year-old games I already own. I wanted to find out just how much they’d improved.

I have a high jank tolerance with games — it builds character — but I’m well aware of Scarlet and Violet’s shortcomings on the original Switch. There’s lag. The frame rate is… inconsistent. There are online connectivity issues. For a lot of people, performance problems overshadowed what was otherwise a great new generation of Pokémon games. With the release of the Nintendo Switch 2, and the accompanying free performance update for Scarlet and Violet, that might finally change.

Starting up the demo of Pokémon Scarlet on the Switch 2 at The Pokémon Company International’s office in Bellevue, Washington, I knew immediately where I wanted to go first: Casseroya Lake, sometimes called “Lag Lake,” where the games’ graphical issues are most apparent. On the original Switch, the game really chugs when you’re on the lake; the frame rate takes a dive, and it struggles to render more than a handful of pokémon in your immediate vicinity. Exploring the liveliest open areas and encountering the pokémon that populate them is one of Scarlet and Violet’s biggest strengths, but on the Switch, Casseroya Lake is dull and empty at best and impossible to navigate at worst.

Playing on the Switch 2, however, Casseroya Lake ran beautifully. There were far more pokémon in view (and I was immediately accosted by a torpedo-like Veluza, same as it ever was), and the lag and stuttering I’d come to expect were nonexistent. I battled that Veluza with no problems. I stumbled upon a Slowpoke outbreak and sent out my Clodsire to auto-battle them — no lag. I found a wild Tera Pokémon and watched the Tera animation play out, looking sharper than I’d ever seen it. (I was playing in docked mode at a station set up by TPCi, so maybe that last one could be credited to the TV. But still.)

It was the same case everywhere I went during my 30-minute demo: a stable and smooth frame rate, significantly faster load times, and far more pokémon populating the world. The Switch 2 update is not a complete overhaul of the graphics themselves — the grass textures looked just as unremarkable as always to my eye, for example — but it does seem to eliminate the performance issues that have dragged Scarlet and Violet down for nearly three years. It’s a noticeable improvement in the world, in battle, in Tera raids, and even in menus.

Is it praiseworthy for a game to simply run well? Maybe not. I don’t pretend to know how games are made on a technical level, or really any level, but I know they’re not easy to make. And I had enough fun with Pokémon Scarlet to play for 400 hours without the performance issues bothering me much. But it did feel bittersweet, briefly, to think how much more these games could have shone if they’d run well in the first place. 

Then, in the last five minutes of my demo, as I waded in a different body of water to confirm that it too ran smoothly, I saw it: among the pods of Buizel dotting the shore, a shiny. 

A good portion of my 400 hours in Scarlet were spent shiny hunting, because even though the alternate-color versions of pokémon are not quite as hard to find as they were in previous games, I get excited every time I see one, without fail. It’s the perfect encapsulation of the kind of joy Scarlet and Violet have to offer: exploring a lively area and finding something special. I caught the shiny Buizel despite knowing that it wasn’t my save file and not mine to keep.

The Switch 2 update is arguably arriving a bit late for my Scarlet save file, depending on how many hours you think are reasonable to spend playing this game. But I also own Violet, and I have played about two hours of that version total. Looking at the shiny Buizel I didn’t get to keep, I realized I was really excited to have a reason to play Violet finally — to rediscover what I liked most about these games, in a state that does them justice.