Pokémon Battlegrounds Ranked Is in Beta, and It Is the First Browser Pokémon Game That Runs on Weak Hardware

2026-11-04 · News and analysis

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Pokémon Battlegrounds Ranked, which the game itself shortens to PB Ranked, is a free browser fan game in beta right now. You build a team of three, you fight another real person in real time, and you climb a ranked ladder. No turns. Both trainers act at once.

That is already unusual. Fan projects almost never ship working competitive netcode, and the ones that try are usually turn based because turns are far easier to synchronise.

But the interesting thing for us is not the pitch. It is what we found when we read the code it serves to your browser.

There is no WebGL and no game engine in it. No Unity, no Godot, no Pixi, no WebAssembly. The whole game draws itself with plain 2D canvas. Its engine bundle asks for a 2D drawing surface in 210 places and calls the sprite drawing function in 374 of them, and there is not a single WebGL call anywhere in what it serves.

That matters because it inverts the rule we have been repeating in every browser fan game article. Browser Pokémon games have been the tier that excludes weak devices and punishes Apple hardware. This one should not do either.

The Short Version

• Free, in your browser, no install. Nothing to download and no runtime to set up.
• Real time 3v3 battles against live opponents, with a ranked ladder and rating changes.
• Auto mode or Manual mode. Auto moves for you while you call attacks. Manual gives you movement and a dodge.
• An account is required. You sign in, pick a trainer name and a trainer character.
• Rendered with 2D canvas only. No WebGL, so no WebGL 2.0 gate and no Safari problem.
• About 6.3 MB of JavaScript, nearly all of it one 6.4 MB engine bundle.
• Netcode is a single WebSocket. Standard, and it means your ping is the experience.
• Touch controls are built in and the site tells phone players to turn sideways.
• Controller support is real. We found gamepad handling in its input code.
• Modes beyond ranked: Battle Tower, practice against bots, friendly matches and tournaments.
• Nine generations of Pokémon, with one Mega Evolution per match.
• Made with heavy AI assistance, which the developer says openly.
• Gigantamax, more Pokémon and more modes are on the stated roadmap.

How It Plays

You pick three Pokémon and fight on a 2D field. The timer is four minutes for 3v3 and seven minutes for 6v6.

The two control modes are the real design decision:

• Auto mode. Your Pokémon handles movement. You call the four attacks, switch, and decide when to Mega Evolve. Keys 1 through 4.
• Manual mode. You drive the Pokémon yourself with WASD or a stick, and you get a dodge. This is the skill ceiling.

So positioning is optional. A new player uses Auto and plays something close to a fast action Pokémon battle. A committed player uses Manual and dodges attacks. That is a smart ramp, and it is also why a controller feels natural here in a way it does not in most browser fan games.

Mega Evolution once per match is the strategic hook. Three Pokémon, one Mega, so choosing which one and when is the decision the match turns on.

Around the ranked ladder there is a Battle Tower daily run, bot practice, friendly matches and tournaments. Doubles are reported as present. There is also a side puzzle mode called PB Grid.

What We Found in the Code

We fetched what the site actually serves and looked at it, because the rendering path decides which of our readers can play this.

Here is what the game ships:

• A main script of about 147 KB, which handles menus, ranks, roster and the lobby.
• One engine bundle of 6.4 MB, which is the game itself. Abilities, Pokémon data, move logic, effects.
• Eleven small modules for audio, controls, backdrop, achievements and the extra modes.
• Total: roughly 6.3 MB of JavaScript.

And the rendering:

• 210 places where it requests a 2D canvas context. That is the only kind of drawing surface it ever asks for.

• 374 sprite drawing calls in the code. Classic 2D blitting. These are call sites in the source, not a per frame count, which we cannot read from the file.

• Zero WebGL contexts. No webgl, no webgl2, no shader creation, no experimental contexts.

• Zero WebAssembly. Nothing compiled is being loaded.

• No engine. We checked for Unity, Godot, Phaser, Pixi and Three. Not present.

One caution on that last point, because it is the kind of thing that gets misreported. Searching the bundle for "Pixi" and "Unity" does return hits. They are false positives. "Pixi" matches the Pokémon ability Pixilate, and "Unity" matches Immunity. There is no Pixi.js and no Unity in this game. It is hand written.

The netcode is one WebSocket connection. No peer to peer, no fancy rollback layer that we can see. Standard client to server, which for a real time game means your latency to their server is the experience.

Why This Is the One That Reaches Cheap Hardware

Our Pokémon fan games guide has a browser tier, and that tier has always come with two warnings. This game dodges one of them completely.

Compare it to Pokémon Battle Advanced, the other real time browser Pokémon game we covered. That one is Godot, and Godot's web export is forced onto WebGL 2.0. Which means it needs a GPU path that Safari handles badly, so iPhone and iPad are its worst platforms, and performance is a known problem the developer acknowledges.

PB Ranked has no WebGL at all. 2D canvas is the oldest and best supported drawing surface on the web, working in every browser on every platform for well over a decade. There is no Safari penalty here, because there is no WebGL for Safari to get wrong.

One distinction matters, and it is the one easiest to blur. This buys compatibility, not guaranteed speed. "It will run" and "it will run smoothly" are different claims, and only the first follows from the code. A weak ARM chip can still struggle to push a lot of sprites through a 2D canvas, and a 6.4 MB bundle has to be downloaded and parsed before anything happens at all. What we can say from the files is that nothing here locks out a device the way a WebGL 2.0 requirement does. What we cannot say, without testing on one, is the frame rate you will get.

So the device picture:

• Android retro handhelds. Should work. A Retroid or Android Anbernic with Chrome is a real target. The 6.3 MB download is the main cost, and it is one time per cache.
• Steam Deck and Windows handhelds. Comfortable. Desktop mode browser, controller already attached.
• iPhone and iPad. Should work, and this is the notable part. Touch controls are built in and the site explicitly tells phone players to rotate to landscape. The usual Apple browser gaming problem does not apply here.
• Cheap Linux handhelds. Still no, though the reason is more specific than we usually write. ArkOS, muOS, KNULLI and OnionOS ship no browser themselves, and PortMaster does offer one: NetSurf, listed for 39 devices including the whole budget Anbernic tier. But NetSurf runs JavaScript through Duktape, a small interpreter rather than a modern engine like Chrome's V8 or Safari's JavaScriptCore. A 6.3 MB game built from ES modules with WebSocket netcode is far outside what that can do. We have not tested it, and we do not expect it to load.

So the exclusion stands, but state it correctly. It is not that these devices have no browser. It is that the browser they can get is a lightweight one from before this kind of web game existed. Nothing about this game being light changes that, because the limit is the JavaScript engine, not the graphics.

The Two Things That Will Actually Stop You

Not the rendering. These:

It needs an account. You sign in and create a trainer before you can play ranked. On a handheld with no keyboard, typing credentials is genuinely annoying, and an OAuth sign in flow in a handheld browser is worse. This is the real friction on an Anbernic, not the frame rate.

It is real time and online. Your wifi decides your matches. A cheap Android handheld's wifi radio is usually its weakest component, and this is a game where a late input loses you a trade. A light renderer does not help a bad connection. If you want to be competitive on the ladder, play it on something wired or near the router.

There is a third, smaller one. Accounts can be banned, and the game surfaces a banned account notice. Normal for anything with a competitive ladder, worth knowing before you invest in a rank.

On the AI Question

The developer says the game was made with deep AI assistance and notes that some areas still need fine tuning. We think stating that plainly is the right call, and it is consistent with how we have handled other projects this year.

It is also visible in the artefact. A 6.4 MB hand written bundle containing hundreds of Pokémon, their abilities, their move logic and bespoke effects for individual attacks is a very large amount of content for a project at this stage. That is the kind of breadth AI assistance produces well, and the kind of thing that historically stalled fan projects at thirty Pokémon.

What we would watch is balance and edge cases, because those are what fine tuning means in a competitive game. Breadth is the easy part now. A ladder that feels fair is not.

For the wider picture, see our AI assisted game recreation coverage.

Will It Get Taken Down?

Maybe. We say this in every fan game article and we mean it here too.

The game carries a disclaimer that it is a free fan game and not affiliated with Nintendo, The Pokémon Company, Game Freak or Creatures. That is the correct thing to put there and it has never been what decides these cases.

What raises the risk profile here, honestly, is that this is a free online competitive Pokémon battler. That is adjacent to products The Pokémon Company sells. Our Pokémon fan games guide has a section on projects that did get taken down, and the pattern is that visibility plus commercial adjacency is what draws attention.

If you want to play it, play it now rather than bookmarking it for next year. That is not alarmism, it is just how this category has gone.

Our Take

This is worth twenty minutes of your evening, and it is free, so the only cost is the download.

The design is genuinely clever. Auto and Manual modes mean one game serves both the person who wants to call attacks and the person who wants to dodge them, and Mega Evolution once per match gives every fight a real decision.

The technical choice is the part we did not expect. Building it on 2D canvas with no engine looks like a limitation and is actually why it travels. It runs where Godot and Unity browser games choke, which means phones and cheap Android handhelds and iPhones, and that is a much bigger audience than the desktop only fan game norm.

The caveats are the honest ones. It is a beta, balance is unproven, there is an account wall that is awkward on a handheld, and real time online play is only as good as your network. Beta means it changes under you.

If you want a Pokémon fan project that works on a phone in landscape with no install, this is now the first thing we would point you at.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Pokémon Battlegrounds Ranked free?

Yes. It runs in your browser at no cost and there is nothing to install. You do need to create an account.

Can I play PB Ranked on an Android handheld?

It should work, and it is better suited to one than any other browser Pokémon game we have covered, because it uses plain 2D canvas instead of WebGL. The practical obstacles are typing your login on a handheld and the device's wifi, since this is a real time online game.

Does it work on an iPhone?

It should. Touch controls are built in and the site tells phone players to turn the phone sideways. Unlike WebGL based browser fan games, there is no Safari graphics problem here, because the game uses no WebGL at all.

Can I play it on a Miyoo Mini or an Anbernic RG35XX?

Almost certainly not. The firmware ships no browser, and while PortMaster does offer one, NetSurf, it runs JavaScript on a small interpreter called Duktape rather than a modern engine. A 6.3 MB game built from ES modules with WebSocket netcode is well beyond that. We have not tested it and do not expect it to load.

Does PB Ranked support a controller?

Yes. We found gamepad handling in the game's input code, and the site lists Xbox, PlayStation and Switch Pro controllers. Keyboard and touch both work too.

Is it turn based like the real Pokémon games?

No. Battles are real time and both players act simultaneously. There is an Auto mode that handles movement for you so you only call attacks, and a Manual mode where you move and dodge yourself.

How big is the download?

Around 6.3 MB of JavaScript, almost all of it a single 6.4 MB engine bundle. That is a one time cost per browser cache, but it is a noticeable wait on slow handheld wifi.

Was PB Ranked made with AI?

The developer says it was made with deep AI assistance and that some areas need fine tuning. That is disclosed openly rather than something we uncovered.

Is it the same thing as Pokémon Arena 2D?

No. Both are real time Pokémon sprite fighters and the confusion is understandable. Pokémon Arena 2D is a separate project that is not playable yet. PB Ranked is in beta and playable right now.

Is PB Ranked official?

No. It is an unofficial fan game and says so, with no affiliation to Nintendo, The Pokémon Company, Game Freak or Creatures.

Related Reading

• Best Pokémon fan games and which hardware each one needs
• Pokémon Battle Advanced, the WebGL browser fan game this one contrasts with
• Pokémon Arena 2D, the similar sounding project that is not out
• Best Pokémon ROM hacks for the cartridge side of the hobby
• How to emulate retro games on Android, the devices this runs on best
• Best handhelds under 50 dollars and why they cannot open a browser

Written 4 November 2026. The rendering path, bundle sizes and input support described here were read directly from the files the game serves, not from its marketing. It is in beta and under active development, so balance and feature details will change.