The main thing that made that made me decide to randomly watch this is just simply that the terrible main character of the main anime, Ash, is replaced with Red, but Red's competence is largely shown off-camera as he magically captures all Pokemon and the legendary birds as a cliffnote. The character of Blue is outright worse than the main anime's version of Gary, regularly being a coward and/or useless, and his final battle with Red is very, very short with no real effort to explain why a Charizard beats a Blastoise other than Blue sitting and doing nothing as he loses. While the anime largely invented a character for Mewtwo, in this series he is a screaming beast that sounds awkward to say the least, and he casually loses to Red's Mega Charizard. This special's actual purpose was to advertise Mega Pokemon to people who only like the first generation, essentially, by appealing to them through the arbitrary mascot of that fandom, Charizard. I would argue Mewtwo is the secondary mascot of that portion of the fanbase, and humiliating him in such a fashion is rather undesirable.
The fight scenes are so bad and generic to the point they actually made me appreciate the main anime's fight scenes, which at least have some effort. Giovanni's fight is the one given the most focus in the series, and he decimates 5/6 of Red's Pokemon with a Rhyhorn, an unevolved Pokemon. Red is using fully evolved Pokemon that have type advantages against the Rhyhorn (which he hasn't used before and casually ditches after the fight), yet Rhyhorn defeats all of them in one hit. Giovanni claims his Pokemon is much higher in level, which shouldn't be possible when his is unevolved, unless you're going to pretend that the boss of Team Rocket wouldn't evolve his Pokemon as soon as possible. The attacks he uses are very unfitting such as Thunderbolt, even using it against a Jolteon that should be outright immune to it rather than any actual Ground attacks which would believably defeat it in one hit, which is supposed to be Giovanni's signature type anyway.
After this Rhyhorn with the full power of the writers behind it is finally defeated, Giovanni sends out a evolved Rhyhorn, Rhydon, against the only thing with more bias from the writers, Red's Charizard. Rhydon has a quadruple type advantage against Charizard, but despite the Rhyhorn casually defeating everything else, Charizard of course defeats Rhydon. It's almost as if the writers are going out of their way to ensure things with type advantages always lose. Within the original anime, Giovanni's Rhydon losing despite type advantage was one of the most infamous moments, and even when the writing favors Rhyhorn, poor Rhydon just can't seem to catch a break, being a rather pitiful mistake to be repeated countless years later. Giovanni generically gets very hyped up for this non-sensical battle, and disbands Team Rocket over it upon losing as a mediocre attempt to develop the character and justify Giovanni abandoning Team Rocket at the end of the games.
If it wasn't obvious, this series requires you to like Charizard a lot. The only particularly worthwhile moments fans would want to see redone are Blue, Mewtwo, and Giovanni, and the first two are casually glossed over and more generic than their anime counterparts while Giovanni's section is especially terrible.
