A new Pokemon game has been unveiled as part of the Pokemon Day 2025 presentation entitled Pokemon Champions, taking the franchise in a surprising direction.
While Pokemon is known by many for its long-running RPG series, it’s much more than that. Put aside the Pokemon anime, trading card game, and apps. It’s much more than that just within the space of video games.
Pokemon Unite is a successful MOBA, Detective Pikachu is a credible adventure game, and the list goes on. It’s not just live-service games and series, either, as there have been one-off games that took Pokemon in a new direction like Pokken Tournament and Pokemon Conquest. Pokemon is set to take its core gameplay to a new frontier in Pokemon Champions.
Pokémon Champions! | Announcement Trailer
Pokemon Champions is a battle simulator that brings together gameplay elements of multiple mainline Pokemon games. The reveal trailer showed Terastalization and mega evolution, hinting at a new style of gameplay unlike anything seen before.
This continues what has been a strong push into mobile gaming by The Pokemon Company. Long Nintendo-exclusive, the company saw major success with Pokemon GO. From there, there titles ranging from Pokemon Cafe Mix to Pokemon TCG Pocket have followed. Though many of these apps have battling in some form, many of them are significantly different from what’s contained in the actual video games.
The Pokemon Company will be hoping to bridge that gap when Pokemon Champions is released.
The reveal of Pokemon Champions follows reports of a “Project Synapse” game that was uncovered in a major data breach of Game Freak.
Fan fascination regarding the leaks focused on some disturbing unreleased lore involving Pokemon such as Typhlosion and Rapidash. Alongside that were some humorous scrapped Pokemon designs, including a toilet Rotom.
However, the breach’s revelations went much further than that. Pokemon Champions was one of the big reveals, along with a few other in-development Pokemon games. Some minor details regarding the probable 10th-generation Pokemon RPGs were also revealed. Among these titles was a new multiplayer game entitled “Project Synapse.”
Pokemon Champions may be the “Project Synapse” that was discussed in the leaks. The game was branded as a new multiplayer-focused Pokemon game. Though there was speculation that the game would be a sort of competitive shooter, this isn’t the case. Game Freak acknowledged that a major data breach occurred, but no media regarding the game was ever released. The only other major piece of information was that the game was being developed by both Game Freak and ILCA. It’s unclear whether ILCA is included in the development of Pokemon Champions, though the studio shares an office building with Pokemon Works.
ILCA is a development studio that has a historically close relationship with The Pokemon Company. Despite not actually being owned by Nintendo, it developed the Pokemon HOME app and led development for Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl. It has also tackled projects outside Pokemon, maintaining a relationship with Bandai Namco that has yielded the One Piece Odyssey RPG and an upcoming installment in the Ace Combat series.
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