Being the first Pokemon series, this one doesn’t really prove to excel in any category.
The main idea of this series is pretty simple and that is introducing us to the Pokemon World. I find this fairly logical and exactly what was needed but certainly it lacked the punch. This series pretty much focuses on Pokemon and not the battles or the trainers. As a result we’ve got this bratty Satoshi who is very immature and is looked after by two gym leaders to guide him to the pokemon battles and how to be a trainer. Since it wanted to focus on the pokemons, the gym battles aren’t even a battle sometimes and the party of Satoshi’s pokemons frequently changes. The battle rules are also questionable in the series sometimes but were later updated to a better version in the next series.
The problem with this series is clearly the pacing. The Kanto region lasted just for the first 80-90 episodes which went pretty fast and well but with orange islands following it, which was boring as hell and we got the remaining episodes on Johto region which made it even worse. Almost all the episodes are a one episode stories without much of a connection throughout the journey, which aren’t really exciting as well. It really stays loyal to the original game for better or for worse.
I also have problems with characters like Shigeru who is once introduced as a rival but Satoshi clearly isn’t even on his standards. This might be an unpopular opinion but Charizard was annoying as hell in the entirety of the first half. I personally think it was beacause Satoshi wasn’t a fully grown trainer but he never became even at the end of the whole series. He wasn’t given the time to grow as a trainer himself.
As a whole, this series is pretty monotonous which made it kinda mid without anything much to talk about it.
