Dude how can you compare this ash to bw ash. That ash was a disaster. His so called legendary defeating pikachu lost to a lvl 5 snivy and a newly evolved lucario. This ash's 10000000000000000x stronger than that weak a** ash.
Is he? It's incredibly easy to write off BW Ash, but he did get some decent Pokemon there. He just fcked up on his team vs. Cameron. If he used Pikachu, Krookodile, Leavanny, Pignite, Boldore and Unfezant he probably would've won, but yeah.. Oshawott and Snivy were unreliable teammembers at best most of the time and that cost him.
XY Ash was strong, no denying that, but I wouldn't put Hawlucha, Noivern or Goodra way above stuff like Krookodile, Pignite (both seem obvious) and Boldore (beat Clay's Excadrill and a Reuniclus).
And you know there were circumstances that to those defeats (being zapped by Zekrom and evolution meant an insta-win, Karma was just on the wrong side that day).
I feel like Goh will catch Zapdos given its appearance in recent merch promotion, and the new opening. However it's a bit weird though since Ash, a skilled trainer with many regions of experience struggled against it (and Moltres) back in Kalos, but then a newbie trainer like Goh can seemingly catch it just like that.
Which Merch??
That being said, this could be a relatively young Zapdos or Go could use Flygon which has a very positive match-up against it.
You know now that I think about it, people have problems with Gou catch Zapdos because he's a newbie trainer right? So when in Journey's does he stop being a newbie trainer? Its not like he has a metric like gym battles to determine if he's good enough to not be a newbie trainer or not and or that matter which season did Ash stop being one? I would assume OS but he made many fatal mistakes and most of his badges were earned in unconventional ways.
Personally, Ash stopped being a noob after his win against Whitney. I'm hesitant to say the Drake battle, since he did good there and definitely showed signs of improving beyond the noob-state of mind.. but the Whitney-battle was the last time I actually think Ash's noob-side was witnessed and he started to think more.
And then Nimbasa happened. #relapse.
Meh, the only UB I want to see is Naganadel coming back like Charizard did in BW.
It never should have left and I'd like for it to feel like an actual Pokemon of Ash's
The hell, the only reason it even came to Alola was because it wanted to save it's friends from darkness so they could be happy again. Being with Ash would take him away from where it wanted to be all along. It returning was just another Goodra situation since Ash didn't have a full team otherwise and Solgaleo would be way too OP.