Pokemon Advanced Generation

The first three seasons have great writing. Team Rocket is given more personality, the new characters are all good, and the show dives into some of the lore mentioned in the games. The battles have better choreography than previous seasons.

As always the ending is meaningless both Ash and May loses their championship. At least Ash gets to win The Battle Frontier but May even loses her second chance to victory.

Battle Frontier is the worst season among the Advanced Generations. It felt forced because the story was already over. Then they make it happen in Kanto instead of Hoenn. In games, the Battle Frontier is filled ... with battles. But here they are travelling the entire Kanto region again for some reason (maybe because of the release of remakes of GEN 1 games). Team Rocket becomes annoying again. And there are many unnecessary fillers.

One of the thing that made GEN 3 games better is the different personality given to each route and town/city. In the anime, each route and town/city is generic and lacks personality. Fortree City and Sootopolis City are given some personality by showing their unique architecture but they never go deep into it.

So, as anticipated, I did end up enjoying Advanced quite a bit more than the Original for most of my viewing experience. Though you may have noticed that the overall score doesn't reflect that... And it wasn't for the same reasons I'd expected...

As I mentioned in my review for the original series, Hoenn was my generation. I didn't get really into playing the games myself until Sapphire/Ruby. I expected to connect better with Advanced because the towns and gym leaders and some of the special events with teams Aqua and Magma were more familiar to me. But that wasn't really the case. It was kind ... of nice to know what was coming next, but for the most part, the gym battles were just... gym battles. It was the way the second season was handled that won me over. The format changed a bit for this second season, and I feel it changed for the better. I think adding in the contest side of the Pokémon world broke up the time between Ash's gym battles very nicely. Ash and May switched off pretty evenly. And I felt it just gave the series a better... flow. Much less felt like it could be skipped without consequence, which I think is a huge plus.

And there were a few other places Advanced really shined. I feel like training took a much more prominent place in this season. We saw a lot of Ash actually working with his Pokémon to learn new moves, instead of the miracle, in the nick of time learning that happened a lot in the original. There were still instances of it, for both Ash and May, but it felt like more time went into preparing for each battle or rematch, and it showed Ash growing as trainer. On top of that, the battles got a lot more creative. This was true of the contests where appearance was just as important as effectiveness, but also when it came to Ash's battle strategies. Don't get me wrong, there were still some bullshit plot armor moments. (Because no, Ash, hitting your bird with a bolt of lightning would not give it an electric shield.) But overall, I felt it was a step in the right direction.

At least... This can be said for the first two-thirds of Advanced. More than one thing about Battle Frontier didn't sit quite right with me, but I'll start with the formatting.
Okay, so I know I'm going to soundl like a total hypocrite saying this, but... Frontier just felt rushed. I know, one of my biggest complaints about the original series was that it was too drawn out, but I didn't get the sense that they were really going anywhere throughout Battle Frontier's run. Which shouldn't have been possible, because Frontier took us back to Kanto, where everything should have been familiar. But stopping in towns where Ash previously won his Indigo League badges just didn't have the sense of connection that I felt they should have. For a comparison, I ask you to look back to his Johto travels. To be honest, I don't remember exactly why, but our heroes had to double back through Ecruteak over the course of their journey. And during those episodes where they returned to Ecruteak, they met back up with Morty-- the gym leader-- and had another little adventure having to do with the ghost tower in town-- a prominent aspect of Ecruteak. And I felt like it was a really nice callback.

That's the feeling Frontier should have had. But it didn't. In fact, I don't think I really appreciated the characterization of the gym leaders until that point. It can be kind of subtle, but each gym leader is a really solid reflection of their town. Like Roxanne also running the trainer's school. Rustboro is the first town in Hoenn where you can earn a badge, and the trainer's school being such a big part of it was a really strong reflection of being The Beginning. It gives the towns character and makes them memorable, and I just felt like they really dropped the ball bringing things back to Kanto during Battle Frontier. Of course, there's another thing Frontier can be remembered for...

And now... I suppose we have to discuss the voice acting. It's not typically something I bring up in my reviews unless I have something specific to say. I think it goes without saying that I, like most people, watched Pokémon dubbed. (That's just part of it stemming from my childhood.) Yup, from the company notorious for bad dubs. Who would have thought it would actually be something to mourn when 4Kids lost the rights to a show?

Let's take a step back for a minute, shall we? Remember those little questionnaires in elementary and middle school that tried to determine which learning style you were best suited for? Like, were you most likely to remember a graph drawn on the board, a lecture, or a hands-on activity? I've always been a very auditory person. When I recall something someone said, it's down to every last inflection of their voice. So, regardless of which language I watch a show in, the characters' voices stick with me and become as much a part of their character as any of their actions throughout the series. So it's hell on my ears when even one voice actor is replaced, never mind the entire cast.

Pokémon was one of the few things 4Kids did pretty well. Yes, even with all the censorship and localization they're so well known for. The actors put so much heart into their roles, even when they were saying truly ridiculous things. And I'd had about 400 episodes to get used to them. So maybe I'm a bit biased, but the new dub did just sound worse in general. There was either no emotion behind their words, or everything came out sounding over exaggerated and fake. Some of them (Brock, in particular) grew on me over time, but I want to specifically discuss Ash and May, because I don't think I ever truly appreciated how much Veronica Taylor was carrying this show until she was replaced.

May... I know a lot of people hate May, either because she's inexperienced and says some pretty dumb things (even though Ash did that all the time in the original series) or because she replaced Misty, or whatever other reasons. I really like May as a character. (Significantly more than Misty.) She was a much more active character, and I already mentioned that I liked the way her contest storyline split up the filler between Ash's gym battles nicely. But mostly, I just like how much she grows throughout the series. She goes from not even liking Pokémon-- just wanting to travel-- to learning to love them and finding a purpose in this world. Even throughout her contests, May is very shortsighted, so her departure-- where she finally decided on a goal for herself and started thinking towards the future-- was very satisfying to me. It felt like a complete character arc. (As opposed to Misty, who was kind of just there until she wasn't.)
But I felt May suffered quite a lot from the recasting. Further proof that WHAT you say doesn't matter half as much as HOW you say it. And everything May says after the recast comes out sounding overly timid or insecure, and that's really not who she was written or animated to be. May's defining characteristic was that she's adventurous. She has her low moments. There were lessons to be learned from both doubt and overconfidence over the course of her journey. But she was always just as brave as any of the other characters, and just as passionate about her contests as any of the others were about their dreams. Her new voice just sounded out-of-character, which is a shame because-- for the rest of the cast-- it was pretty clear they were trying to mimc the old voices.

But May was not the one who suffered the most from the recasting. Ash's new voice is the one that really made me wish they'd just gone in an entirely new direction with Ash. Now, I have heard that Sarah Natochenny improves a lot as Pokémon continues and... Good lord, I hope so. May's voice just sounded wrong for her character. Ash's lines frequently came out as bad acting, plain and simple. My biggest complaint is that it sounded, to me, like the real problem was she couldn't both maintain Ash's voice and emote properly. Which I feel should have been a major indication that the job should have gone to someone else, but... We're in it for the long run now.

So, I'm about to dive into Diamond and Pearl, and I'm interested to see how this goes. The next few seasons will be truly blind for me. I watched a few episodes of season three when it first came out, but... Eh. My interest in Pokémon kind of dropped off between Sapphire/Ruby and X/Y. Even if I didn't play much of the games, I was really familiar with the original Pokémon through the movies and just spending a lot of time with older cousins who were drawn in by the Pokémon craze. I've got a vague remembrance of some of the Sinnoh Pokémon, but I can't even remember the Unova starters off the top of my head. So it's promising to be quite a journey, truly free from any nostalgia, and I'm interested to see how that colors the experience.

Pros:
- 95% of this anime is really interesting,
- character development is enjoyable,
- this generation we got 2 more characters,
- we got 2 new evil teams,
- the game story adaptation is acceptable
- the best part of this generation are Battle Frontier fights,
- introduction of pokemon contests,

Cons:
... - The remaining 5% Ash doesn't win Hoen League,
- Some battles are ridiculous,
- Team Rocket appearance can get more annoying,
- The story development is being held up by corporations policy,
- some fans dislike Max character in this generation,

The story takes now in both regions Hoen and Kanto, however best part in my opinin was Battle Frontier arc. The cast shifts to permanent 7 characters in this generation.