Pros
- Great character interactions between Iris and Ash, makes me genuinely want to rewatch BW again.
- Nice callbacks to BW like Haxorus hitting his head in the ground
- Great character writing moment between Iris and Ash's Dragonite
- Iris saying best wishes
Mixed
- Animation wasn't actually as bad as I had originally thought (would chalk that up to my 360p stream lol) and was actually pretty good in spurts, but still pretty underwhelming for what was supposed to the most hype battle of the series yet. Best animation in this episode was the Wide Breaker/Dragon Claw combo with the follow up in Psycho Cutter/Hurricane. Tons of cool smears and fluid animation that was a joy to see. Way down in second place goes to the Thunder Punch/Dragon claw combo alongside the Hurricane/Ice Beam follow up which was alright, but nothing really to write home about. Besides that, the pace and energy of the battle was a bit too slow for my liking with a real lacking of dynamism and had too much dead space with the kind of frenetic movement present in other stronger battles in Journeys like Ash vs Korrina only existing in flashes and ever present static shots that undermined the flow of the battle. There was also this unfortunate dichotomy between the general feeling of slowness animation wise in the battles versus the fact that a lot of the battles also went by so fast (Dragonite v Dracovish and Haxorus vs Dracovish) and those two things colliding together wasn't a great combination and didn't really allow me to get into the battle as much as I could of.
Cons
- Writing was nonexistent and had horrible implications for Journeys going forward and retroactively hurt the previous regions. Effectively literally no explanation for how Iris became Champion, not even a montage of Iris training and beating the Unova Elite 4 or Alder or anything of the sort. No real build-up, nor was there any development or highlight of Iris's progression to becoming Champion. The entire battle felt so fundamentally unsound and incoherent due to the context surrounding the battle just being completely out of whack. I felt nothing when Ash won because the tension was just removed from the battle since I didn't feel as if Iris was characterized as being powerful or a dangerous opponent at all really. The prestige and power of the Champion status holds just about zero weight as a consequence of this battle and it wasn't done in a way that makes sense at all. It's one thing to pursue the storyline of showcasing that Champions and E4s aren't gods and are actually humans that can be beaten, but this ain't it chief. It's as I've said before, Journeys looks to be pursuing story arcs and events that are on surface level really potentially cool and interesting, but in execution are really just a shell of thin bones with barely any meat or depth to bite into and chew on.