It's win-win. They got around the poor tactics and inexperience issue with pure power.
Remember, Vikavolt in the anime is fast, meaning its biggest weakness in the games is a non-issue. We actually know Sophocles' Vikavolt has a SpA+ Nature, and it'll get Bugium Z + Bug Buzz. That's an undeniable threat even if all he does is spam Discharge, Bug Buzz and Dodge.
Lana...even if she doesn't get the Kyogre (or if it's allowed), Primarina + Oceanic Opera is more powerful than any of Ash's Pokemon except Pikachu. And Mallow/Lillie have mythicals to overpower their opponents as well.
I wasn't a fan of giving the cast legends or last-minute upgrades, but it's a much neater way of making the characters convincingly dangerous than plot armour and arsepulls.
It just feels cheap in terms of not really amounting to the actual trainer's SKILL as a battler however. I was REALLY hoping that SM would continue with the non-battler approach in terms of developing their more practical abilities, and showing how they could still be clever with weak resources. This would give balance against a strong character like Ash who is seldom good at any of the more practical non-battle activities. Then, THEN they could maybe give them some power boosts when they had proved they had the intellect to put it to good use.
However besides a few very early episodes and displays, they never really developed on that. Most of the time they just ended up spammers or plot armoured whenever they needed to battle, the anime once again wanting to have its cake and eat it too because writing even small bits of strategy and agency into non-main battles is too hawd compared to the same freaking spam curbstomp each and every time. And I can almost certainly bet they'll abruptly make all of the other students conveniently practical for this ONE event, like with Serena, they couldn't really be bothered at all in terms of long term development but they likely can muster something epic for this one final display.
It just really gives off the almost spirit crushing opposite message from the above idea; that you can give a monkey a Z-Ring and they could pull off a competent battle. I get battling is sort of that thing everyone is made to get good at throughout the show, but SM seemed like it wanted to diverge from that with it's 'fish out of water' premise and defining niches that not everyone was good at without the right experience. At the end of the day, all of them have still done ZERO official battles, they have ZERO experience, and don't pretend that "oh, well they did it all offscreen" excuse isn't lazy bull. This conditional approach I think risks really undermining poor Ash, whose been made to suck miserably at everything the other twerps are good at to make them look remarkable, but they won't be made to show a weakness or forced improvisation in what HE'S worked the whole show to be experienced at, in fact they'll reach his level with NONE of the effort he put in, which just makes him look even worse. Even just having a few moments Ash got to mentor some of them with some battling, but nope they haven't remotely bothered in terms of skills and balance. They're just gonna go into this with POWER POWER POWER, which apparently makes an automatically good battler, but only if you didn't TRAIN to be a good battler this series.
It's like having an episode where Ash is just randomly a better cook than Mallow because he collected enough ingredients or Kiawe can invent better things than Sophocles because he has enough tools, with the half baked excuse that they learned how to offscreen at best.
Last edited: