There's been a subwave of certain Pokémon ROM hacks and fangames recently, not just games in general but real-time pixel battles featuring Pokémon in your browser, and a new one is here turning heads, known as Pokémon Battlegrounds Ranked, which is one of the first to release with online real-time battles with our Pokémon trainers.
This is a new, free browser-based game that gets you choosing three different Pokémon from 9 generations with a goal of beating your rivals in a real-time battle using WASD and four skills mapped to 1,2,3,4 on your keyboard, offering a unique way to battle Pokémon that somewhat feels like an RPG, an overwhelming one at that.
Once you pick your three Pokémon, you can then choose what type of battle you want to jump into, such as "Battle Tower", which you can do once a day to see how many trainers you can beat; you can do a training mode against bots, and the classic tournament battle. Once in-game, you battle it out in auto mode, which will do the movement for you; you just need to use your abilities, or you can go full manual mode and move around with the directional buttons, or pair up your controller if you're really serious.
It's very fast-paced and a little confusing at first, but it's one that I quickly picked up, and it puts you in battles with similar skill levels so you can at least have some chance of winning early on, though it does offer deep customisations and skill distributions for those that want to create the perfect team. It even has the chance to Mega Evolve once per game too, forcing you to pick your team wisely. I believe there are ways to play as doubles too.
Of course, this has been made with deep AI assistance too, so there are moments and areas that need fine-tuning, and once you've sunk a couple of hours into it, you will notice that your desire to continue isn't as strong, but it's free, so there's no complaining on my end, but you will need a Discord or Google account to log in, if you trust the game/developer that is.
This is currently in Beta, and the developer has some new updates coming that will add more Pokémon, more modes and even Gigantamax Pokémon to spice up the gameplay a little, so it's worth taking a look at if you're into fun new Pokémon fan games.
