If you’ve ever played a Pokémon game, you’ve probably heard the phrase “It’s Super Effective!” at least once in your life. It’s used to communicate to the player that an attack has struck an opponent’s elemental weakness. So if my Raichu brings down the Thunder on a water-type Pokemon, the text box will say the attack was “Super Effective,” meaning it did twice as much damage as it would have done to a critter that wasn’t weak to electric-type attacks. The line is so iconic that it’s a meme in and of itself, is the name of a popular Pokémon podcast, and even makes an appearance in the Super Smash Bros. series during Pokémon Trainer’s Final Smash attack. Now, with Pokémon Champions, the games are updating the catchphrase for clarity’s sake.
Today, The Pokémon Company showed off the first in-game footage of Champions, an officially sanctioned battle simulator coming to Switch and mobile devices next year. The trailer revealed a few big features, such as the ability to modify Pokémon’s stats and movesets to create the ideal team, private and ranked battles, and the option to recruit new monsters for your loadout within the app itself. However, eagle-eyed fans also noted that Champions is updating how the game’s battle system communicates attack effectiveness.
Until now, all the game would tell you was that an attack was “super effective” if it exploited an elemental weakness or “not very effective” if you used an attack that an enemy was strong against. Now, it looks like Champions is creating two new distinctions: “extremely effective” and “mostly ineffective.” These are for attacks that dual-type Pokémon are strong or weak against. For example, Torterra is a grass/ground Pokémon, meaning it is weak to ice-type attacks on both accounts, resulting in a four-times damage multiplier. This would make an attack like Blizzard “extremely effective,” rather than just being called “super effective” like a fire-type attack would be, as it would only exploit Torterra’s grass affinity. Scizor, meanwhile, is a bug/steel type, which means both of its elements are strong defensively against grass attacks. As such, a Razor Leaf attack would be “mostly ineffective,” instead of being lumped into the “not very effective” description.
It’s a good way to distinguish these minute but crucial differences that the games haven’t always communicated, but I will miss seeing the iconic line when I’m doing four-times damage to an enemy. What remains to be seen is if this will extend to the RPGs or if this is just something Champions is doing as it caters to the competitive scene. We might know when Pokémon Legends: Z-A launches on Switch and Switch 2 on October 16.