What did you like and dislike about Sun and Moon?

[Soniman]

Soniman, I always knew you were a man of culture. Dare I say, prestige even. These newer series can learn a lot from how well AG was paced throughout its whole run, even without a rival for Ash to ham it up with.

I appreciate it,I try my best lmao. Honestly AG does everything right and the things it does wrong or more just omissions like the no rival thing but I think May's rivals made up for that since AI thought Drew and Harley were great. I guess the Hoenn League was pretty forgettable in terms of no real star power and it was just randos but the actual battles were solid as hell and got so much focus and all the Pokemon got moments to shine. Still the only League where we got 3 6v6 matches. I'd say the Team Aqua/Magma stuff is the only part I'd call trash but it's not like the source material was stellar anyway

 

[Xuxuba]

very true, but the anime's leagues were still always based on them

I see where you coming from, but i think there is enough evidence to suggest that the OI's League drew inspiration from the games' Indigo League aswell, despite not sharing the same name. For example, they both had 4 elite trainers, two women and two men, that you had to beat in order to face the strongest one, which was a spiky haired cool looking trainer who uses Dragonite as his main and final pokémon.

It wasn't located in the Kanto region, but, to be fair, the games' Indigo League didn't exactly belong to one specific region either. After all, it was located between Kanto and Johto.

Technically ash has to do the the same thing as us in the games, he just has an extra step to take which they've instead called the pokemon league(a tournament involving other trainers with 8 eight badges, i always thought it was for realism), which he's always failed till now which is why we haven't seen the part where he has to fight the e4/champion,more than just 8 badges are needed in the anime, also the way how the sm league was formed in the anime also proves the correlation

That is the thing though. Up until now, aside from the names, the only similarity the anime League shared with the game League was the process of getting into them. In the Sun and Moon games, we had to complete all of the trials in order to face the kahuna and we could only face the League after beating all of the kahunas and the trials. Meanwhile, in the animated series, Ash only faced some of the trials, most of the them didn't involve the same activities that you had to do before facing the totem pokémon and everyone could enter the League despite not defeating all of the kahunas and completing the trials. The tournament itself was largely different from the other series aswell, since it didn't have full battles in the finals and the preliminary round was decided by an unfair Battle Royale format.

So, while i definetly think Alola's League is an official League, i wouldn't say it's a traditional one, because there are too many differences, not only when compared to the games, but also when compared to the previous ones from the anime.

I also don't think the games should dictate what matters in the animated series, because, even if Pokémon is an adaptation of the games, it's a very loosely adaptation. So when i say it isn't a traditional League, i am mainly referring to the anime. Otherwise, a lot of things in the anime wouldn't matter, because they differ so much from the games.

 

[Sham]

I enjoyed how they adapted almost all of Alola’s music minus Lusamine’s theme and a couple of routes etc. I loved Alola music and seeing the anime adapt it was great.

 

[Thumbs2]

This makes me wonder who got the worse treatment in this series.

Or Acerola who went from a powerful E4 member in the games to someone who loses to Sophocles?

She lost to Kiawe, first of all.

 

[Xuxuba]

She lost to Kiawe, first of all.

My bad, that battle was so forgettable i couldn't remember her opponent. Either way, her treatment wasn't very well-done, since she didn't get much attention and didn't get to display much of her skills.

 

[Thumbs2]

My bad. Still, think her treatment wasn't very well-done, since she didn't get much attention and didn't get to display much of her skills.

Didn't she get 2 focus episodes and a weird dead Mimikyu?

 

[Xuxuba]

Didn't she get 2 focus episodes and a weird dead Mimikyu?

Are you talking about SM073 and SM094? She wasn't really the focus of the first one, it was Team Rocket and Nanu. The second one she did get more screentime, but it was more focused on the entire group rather than Acerola.

 

[Lionel_B]

What I liked :

- The atmosphere. After, an XY series that glorified his characters, who tried to be serious to make kind to the point of being boring, SM decided to be comical and it feels good to be in a series uninhibited and who gets to to be funny.

- The main characters are all well treated, they get to be endearing, except perhaps Sophocles, but even him to a bow rather well done. And SM's setting allows the show not to involve all the characters in the story of the same episode, so you do not have to have a character that is useless for a season like Serena.

-The Team Rocket has never been so successful outside of season 1. They are true to themselves and are more involved in Pokémon fights because they have captured strong Pokémon. Pokémon which are also the most outstanding since AG.

-The animation that evolves. Although drawing and animation improved over cycles, by far it was stagnating. There the cartoonists and animators seem to enjoy the fact that we are in a comic season to experiment a few things again ! This makes the animation more fluid, more flexible, more expressive, more inventive. And it announces the best for the next cycle.

- His way of dealing with death, which is mature, mature and the series allows himself to do that 3 times, always from a different point of view.

-If the series does not follow an Ash doing the gyms, it is unpredictable, you never know what to expect.

-The fillers are very entertaining and brings a little freshness, it is not Ash who will solve the problems some parts, but the events that go towards him.

-The use of recurring tertiary characters that gives life to the universe.

What I did not like :

-Hau arrives too late and has been under-exploited. And the staging around his defeat at the league proves that The Pokémon Company hates Decidueye, my favorite Pokémon in the region and that makes me angry. As much as Incineroar is presented as the best Pokémon of all time (it's not worse than Greninja in XY, but still), Decidueye has always been humiliated.

-Torracat is poorly exploited. This is Ash's most withdrawn Pokémon, he has no interest outside the Incineroar episodes, and this lack of interest means that I do not care if he succeeds in beating Incineroar or not. To believe that his episode of capture, which is one of the best episodes of the series, enough to make him the star.

-The animation is extraordinary, better than XY, but it is running out of steam in the last season, the league fights are good, but is not at its best.

But despite these flaws, SM is for me the best Pokémon series since AG.

 

[Doppelgänger]

The ONLY Saga where I've seen no haters but also not a lot of big fans. It's solid as hell, great Pokegirl development, the best version of Ash hands down, it was just missing a big "it" factor that set it apart from the others considering Ash had no rivals and his ace, while cool, did not get a big arc or huge preferential treatment. (which some would consider a good thing anyway) still love it though it's my second favorite saga

Those are the very qualities that make AG good. If you add those storylines to the region, the adventure and Pokemon League become a vehicle for settling those storylines, so the competition feels less spontaneous and more overtly scripted.

Few people care about the overall team or league in XY; that region is simply Alain, Serena, and Greninja fanwank.

 

[TheLink]

Those are the very qualities that make AG good. If you add those storylines to the region, the adventure and Pokemon League become a vehicle for settling those storylines, so the competition feels less spontaneous and more overtly scripted.

Few people care about the overall team or league in XY; that region is simply Alain, Serena, and Greninja fanwank.

Hard disagree on that last one. XY wasn't my favorite series by a long shot but boiling it down to those three aspects is doing it a disservice. Yes the focus on Greninja in XYZ got old after awhile, yes Serena could've been handled better, and the series was by no means perfect, but ignoring the good points the series DID have (the Team Flare buildup, the ME Specials, and the battle choreography to name a few) just feels like nitpicking for the sake of it.

 

[Doppelgänger]

Team Flare and the Mega Evolution episodes are synonymous with Alain. They all outflow from the same problem.

 

[TheLink]

Okay legitimate question here: how does "Alain being associated with Team Flare" equal "The Team Flare buildup coming from the same so-called problem of Alain"? I'm not trying to argue with you here I'm just legitimately curious.

And so I'm not off-topic completely here:

While a little compressed, the various island-specific arcs were nice breaks from the constant MeleeMelee focus.

 

[AuraChannelerChris]

New dislike:

Graduation doesn't exist in the freaking school. School is a fancy daycare.

 

[Soniman]

The school didn't really end up mattering given all the initial focus in pre release hype before the saga came out. But whether that's a good or bad thing is up to the person really

Few people care about the overall team or league in XY; that region is simply Alain, Serena, and Greninja fanwank.

Well yes, but actually no.

 

[Doppelgänger]

Okay legitimate question here: how does "Alain being associated with Team Flare" equal "The Team Flare buildup coming from the same so-called problem of Alain"? I'm not trying to argue with you here I'm just legitimately curious.

Team Flare was intended to upstage the Pokemon League as the culminating event of the XY anime.
It wasn't simply a matter of coexistence, like in prior regions such as Sinnoh and Unova. Tetsuo Yajima wanted Team Flare to be more important than the main hook of the franchise.

This is the first major problem: people don't watch competitive sports because they're expecting the athletes to battle a zombie apocalypse.
They're watching because they want to see the athletes compete and win the World Cup. So building toward a zombie apocalypse in a sports show is a fundamentally flawed vision.

But to make Team Flare more important, Yajima had to diminish the Pokemon League, and he used Alain to do that. And this is the second, bigger problem: Alain's very existence is to trivialize Ash's entire adventure. How disinterested he initially was in the league, how quickly he conquered the Gyms, hyper trained with Lysandre's contacts and facilities, fully evolved a team of Pokemon in a short time yet breezed through the league with only one Pokemon.

Alain then defeated Ash, which is essentially a Team Flare triumph over Ash and his goals. This is a similar idea to what happened in Johto, where the new (Blaziken and Hoenn) is shown being better than the old (Charizard and Johto) by literally showing new beat old in battle. Alain's renouncement of his actions during the Team Flare arc itself while also patronizing the viewer afterward by insisting that Ash is somehow superior further denigrates the Pokemon League and Ash's journey.

Consider, if Ash is better than Alain in "everything important" but the very reason Ash traveled to Kalos is to win the league, doesn't that imply that competing in the league is unimportant? The very identity of Pokemon as an anime actually doesn't matter? That's insulting. The writers should never imply such a thing, even if the victory itself might be relatively unimportant in the current series framework.

As for the Mega Evolution specials, they also trivialize Ash's adventure. By featuring Megas, legends, celebrities and world-shaking events on a routine basis, Ash's adventure is small and insignificant. The presence of strong trainers who don't participate in the league is also a problem, because it means the league isn't an assembly of the strongest trainers, but rookies who were lucky Mega trainers not named Astrid and Remo didn't show up.

 

[Power Up]

Team Flare was intended to upstage the Pokemon League as the culminating event of the XY anime.
It wasn't simply a matter of coexistence, like in prior regions such as Sinnoh and Unova. Tetsuo Yajima wanted Team Flare to be more important than the main hook of the franchise.

This is the first major problem: people don't watch competitive sports because they're expecting the athletes to battle a zombie apocalypse.
They're watching because they want to see the athletes compete and win the World Cup. So building toward a zombie apocalypse in a sports show is a fundamentally flawed vision.

But to make Team Flare more important, Yajima had to diminish the Pokemon League, and he used Alain to do that. And this is the second, bigger problem: Alain's very existence is to trivialize Ash's entire adventure. How disinterested he initially was in the league, how quickly he conquered the Gyms, hyper trained with Lysandre's contacts and facilities, fully evolved a team of Pokemon in a short time yet breezed through the league with only one Pokemon.

Alain then defeated Ash, which is essentially a Team Flare triumph over Ash and his goals. This is a similar idea to what happened in Johto, where the new (Blaziken and Hoenn) is shown being better than the old (Charizard and Johto) by literally showing new beat old in battle. Alain's renouncement of his actions during the Team Flare arc itself while also patronizing the viewer afterward by insisting that Ash is somehow superior further denigrates the Pokemon League and Ash's journey.

Consider, if Ash is better than Alain in "everything important" but the very reason Ash traveled to Kalos is to win the league, doesn't that imply that competing in the league is unimportant? The very identity of Pokemon as an anime actually doesn't matter? That's insulting. The writers should never imply such a thing, even if the victory itself might be relatively unimportant in the current series framework.

As for the Mega Evolution specials, they also trivialize Ash's adventure. By featuring Megas, legends, celebrities and world-shaking events on a routine basis, Ash's adventure is small and insignificant. The presence of strong trainers who don't participate in the league is also a problem, because it means the league isn't an assembly of the strongest trainers, but rookies who were lucky Mega trainers not named Astrid and Remo didn't show up.

Oh yes, I will definitely take into account someone talking out of their ass about what Yajima wanted to do and what he didn't. The entire first 3 paragraphs of your " argument" contain a butt load of assumptions with zero backing so everything there is irrelevant

- How did Alain admitting that he was duped by a criminal organization patronize viewers that Ash is somehow superior? What? So because Alain realized he was in the wrong and Ash wasn't a part of Team Flare, this gets rid of the fact that Alain beat Ash in the Kalos League?

- Probably because the writers did no such thing? Are you forgetting that Kalos was the only region to showcase the crushing feelings of people who didn't complete the badge quest and how important that was to them? The very fact that SM's league was what is what is an insult to the people who actually fought their way up to try and compete in an elite league.

- Wait, is someone arguing that Ash should have been even more popular and portrayed even better than he already was in XY? Is the sky falling? Oh yes, by somehow focusing on someone else in a series that people criticize for being " excessively " focused on Ash, that's a bad thing now because god forbid we get other perspectives in the anime

This is the kind of " substance " people have when they criticize XY lmao. Yes, maybe SM fans do apparently " substantiate " their points. Unfortunately, that substantiating is full of holes, misinformation, and downright hypocrisy.

Yes, the assumption that a majority of XY fans don't accept criticism absolutely could be true. Of course, when this is the kind of criticism that XY gets, I can fully understand why they don't " accept it " and argue

----------------------

In regards to SM, the how the league was executed is a major flaw of SM as it showcases the absolute inability of SM to construct an interesting narrative

 

[Epicocity]

This is the first major problem: people don't watch competitive sports because they're expecting the athletes to battle a zombie apocalypse.
They're watching because they want to see the athletes compete and win the World Cup. So building toward a zombie apocalypse in a sports show is a fundamentally flawed vision.

Um...what?

1) This isn't real life? We're watching a narrative that's building. Of course people don't expect a zombie apocalypse at the end of a tournament, but...we're not just watching the tournament are we? No, because we're watching...

2) An adventure show, not a sports show. It's adventure. Evil bad guys with world-ending schemes are part of the adventure. The League is part of the adventure.

Which, on-topic, disliked that SM removed Ash's wanderlust and the sense of adventure that came with it.

 

[Sham]

Um...what?


Which, on-topic, disliked that SM removed Ash's wanderlust and the sense of adventure that came with it.

What does sense of adventure even mean? He’s going to school? I’m pretty sure most students who are in school wish they could travel but they can’t... because they’re in school. What would of been the point in introducing the school format if he was traveling? Just say you don’t like the school format but it has nothing to do with him lacking a sense of adventure especially when he was actively excited to be traveling Ula Ula, Kanto and Poni. As soon as he went to Poni he wanted to see the Kahuna.

 

[mehmeh1]

What does sense of adventure even mean? He’s going to school? I’m pretty sure most students who are in school wish they could travel but they can’t... because they’re in school. What would of been the point in introducing the school format if he was traveling? Just say you don’t like the school format but it has nothing to do with him lacking a sense of adventure especially when he was actively excited to be traveling Ula Ula, Kanto and Poni. As soon as he went to Poni he wanted to see the Kahuna.

Him joining school instead of travelling around the islands could be said that it's him lacking his wonderlust and sense of adventure (IMO it's kinda true, even though he still displays it many times)

 

[Dragalge]

Him joining school instead of travelling around the islands could be said that it's him lacking his wonderlust and sense of adventure (IMO it's kinda true, even though he still displays it many times)

You can have an adventure anywhere! Including a prison cell!

Being stationary means nothing!