Whew, so I came into the episode with relatively normal expectations and I left totally disheartened...
Never believed that the Mega Ring people were so flippantly throwing around would actually come to fruition so I had no problem with that. It was annoying there was no mention of other Kalos characters to the best of my knowledge since no subs, but that was really not much of a problem, rather just a little disappointing.
No, the problem I had with this episode was what I was afraid of. A mostly flat battle with subpar animation and really hacky writing.
First talking aesthetics and animation. Really, I was incredibly disappointed in this. Seriously, is this the best they can do these days? The battle had next to no pace, its action was mostly slow and boring, and there was a for the most part, there was a total lack of frenetic energy. It was like watching an Alola battle and not even a particularly good one, which there was few in the first place. The animation in the battle barely had any oomph to it. It didn’t sell anything.
There were some good cuts at the beginning of ML vs Dragonite where it looked to pretty energetic before it mostly collapsed at the end. Let’s not even talk about how pathetic Gengar vs Mienshao was.
I rewatched the ML vs Pikachu gym match after seeing that mostly contemptible display of a battle and laughed at the stark difference. I really can’t believe I was expecting a series that had consistently let me down to somehow rocket back up and match what was one of the best XY battles.
To summarize, disappointing and mostly terrible.
Now on the writing side of the episode and battle.
Of course, I don’t know Japanese, so it’ll be a little hard, but whatever. The best parts were the Ash and Korrina moments as well as Riolu and Lucario/Korrina moments.
As of the writing in the battle itself...
I expect Dragonite to ascend and replace Snorlax/Incineroar on Ash’s best team if this is how busted he is with next to no training.
Seriously, he takes several hits from Meinshao and a high-jump kick and wins with next to zero help from Gengar. Sure, that’s pretty reasonable. But then, this is the part that I really hoped wouldn’t happen.
It somehow 1v1ed ML.
ML was the same Pokémon that took Pikachu to the brink with Pikachu at literally full health iirc in XY and Korrina hadn’t exactly mastered it. And I’m supposed to somehow believe Dragonite is so inherently busted that it can 1v1 it. And it’s not even that I have a problem with that actually happening, bar it being done it a totally lazy fashion with terrible writing as it happened here. As I said in the episode preview discussion, if the battle can sell ML vs Dragonite with Dragonite winning in a way that makes sense, I would barely have any problem with it.
But no, it really didn’t do that. Again, I don’t know Japanese so I’ll rewatch it, but Dragonite’s tornado/counter shield(?) strategy didn’t sell it at all. Dragonite took some damage from the Aura Sphere and a barrage of attacks from Power-Up punch and in return it threw some rocks at ML and then basically one-shot it with Dragon Claw...
This is like top-tier writing here. A Dragonite with next to no training and very few feats of strength defeated ML. Again, I’m expected this level of utter obscenity in power level to sustain itself and end up with Dragonite joining Ash’s strongest team as hackMon TM.
So all in all, totally farcical episode. It managed to disappoint my relatively normal expectations for the episode and displayed an utter lack of good writing that really has been the through line of this series and was very lackluster on the animation front as well.