Pokemon (2019) + Ultimate Journeys has Ash/Satoshi visit the Galar region to participate in the World Championship. His companions this time are: Go/Goh, a "second Ash" as the original advertising describes him & Koharu/Chloe, the "Misty" or female companion of the season.
- Goh kind of sucks. He's been a largely mixed-opinions character in the show despite his enormous presence as Ash's companion. His main focus is catching Pokemon to somewhat contrast Ash's Pokemon Battling focus.
- Koharu/Chloe is rarely around. Despite being the female companion of the show, she's actually has very little screen time. She often just stays at a research lab with her Eevee and occasionally has a focused episode on her Eevee meeting its various evolutions.
- Many past characters and companions of Ash return for a short episode or arc often replacing Koharu/Chloe as Ash's companion.
Despite it being a Galar focused season, we've actually been visiting a lot of other places and focused on other region's Pokemon. Even notable Galarian characters get very little screen time or none at all.
- Bea & Allister were the only Galarian Gym leaders to have their own little arc
- Raihan, Opal, & Marnie got at least 1 episode of focus and everything else was just background stuff
- Everyone else like Hop was basically either background characters or non-existant
- Chairman Rose and his crappy "antagonist" role from the games is here but then gets quickly resolved in less than 6 episodes it felt like
- Leon has a bit of a presence as he's the main champion of the World Championship and had quite a bit of screen time
- Sonia had a bit of a presence early on but then was relegated to a background role
The weird thing is that we had quite a few gag/filler & even recap episodes with Goh/Ash's pokemon getting into shenanigans or made-up scenarios and Team Rocket's really bad & pointless filler episodes that could've have been better used as actual episodes with more Galarian characters or doing more with all the past guest characters that showed up.
Anyways the main story was Ash working his way up the rankings to participate in the World Championships but the World Championships themselves was actually lacking and suffered in-real-life production issues despite being a tournament of Champions.
- Many of the early Champion vs Champion battles were simple 3on3 Pokemon battles that felt like you were watching the video game version of a Pokemon battle as each battle ended just as fast as the next with Pokemon quickly One-shotting each other
- The only battles that felt like they put in effort with the ones where Ash was facing down someone
- Again, production issues were very apparent as there were episode delays and recap episodes and even skipping over a whole Champion vs Champion battle between Diantha & Leon
- I'm sure everyone has heard of Ash winning against the undefeated champion Leon by now but it was a bit of a cop-out victory as Ash was allowed to use all 3 gimmicks (Dynamax, Mega Evolution, & Z-Crystal) because Leon wanted to a hype final match (he only used Dynamax). The match was somewhat interfered with by Eternatus who had to regulate all the Dynamax energy whatever which recharged both Leon & Ash's Dynamax bands which let them Dynamax an additional time
- Once again, it definitely felt like they put all the effort and budget into Ash's battles especially during that last bit against Leon but by comparison the other Champion vs Champion battles felt even more lackluster because of it.
So Ash is the World Champion winning with his best pal and true ace, Pikachu at the confirmed canon age of TEN YEARS OLD. Everyone keeps making the jokes about Ash's canon age and the fact that he completed his ENTIRE JOURNEY IN UNDER A YEAR despite it not making any sense time-wise.
