Next month, Pokemon Champions will bring the turn-based action of Pokemon battles to Nintendo Switch 2–and later this year, to mobile devices. Champions will be making some impactful changes to the core battling mechanics of the Pokemon franchise, including the removal of one of the game’s most long-lasting statistics: Individual Values, or IVs.
IVs are stat modifiers that every individual Pokemon is assigned at random once caught by the player, and they impact how that Pokemon’s attack, defense, and HP grow as it levels up and evolves. Pokemon Champions will remove this randomization from the equation, though the reason for the change has not been fully explained.
Speaking with a roundtable of journalists over Zoom, development director and game producer Masaaki Hoshino says the decision to remove IVs was not taken lightly. In his words, it took a “heated discussion with [Shigeki] Morimoto,” one of Pokemon’s original designers, to get the change made, in the hopes of making the game’s barrier of entry lower for new players.
