*sigh*... What can I say? Don't worry, I'm not blatantly hating, I enjoyed this series quite a bit. But the thing is, it has been running for way too long with very little changes to it. Ok, I love this series as a kid (until I started watching Digimon!) and I suppose I still like it quite a bit, BUT it seems too repetitive. Its one filler after the next, and you're not sure which ones are super important, Ash himself isn't supposed to be some monstrous super trainer so I can't hate there, but he has pretty much NO sense of character development that you seem to see in the manga whatsoever. (Even now, in the Unova season he truly is ten years old. No seriously, they mentioned his age, he's roundabout the same, while in the manga he's sixteen-ish). It's entertaining and a whole lotta fun for the first twenty, thirty episodes where he's seriously going on some epic adventure on par with a trip through the beginning of the Grand line in One Piece, and then it sort of... fizzles out... He'll meet an odd pokemon, team rocket appears, tries to capture it, Pikachu (who sounds annoying by the way!) zaps them and poof! Day over. The animation is also nothing special, in fact it seems pretty sucky, though they seemed to have put SOME effort into it (better than many Gainax productions!) There isn't much need for a quality story and you really don't care. It's all about trying to become the pokemon master! (ignore the gotta catch 'em all reference in the theme song, it's pretty much trolling you and telling you to play the games...) Nice, not a cliche'd save the world thing, though leaning a bit too heavily on the shonen side of things ("I'm the man who will become Hokage!" "I will become the Pirate King!" "I'll become an expert Hunter!" And the worst of them all, Digimon's betrayal "I am the man who will become the Digimon King!") and then just to make things worse, has a main character who pretty much resets in terms of strength after every season instead of becoming level 89 and stuff like he does in the manga AND games! (Pokémon Crystal revived my respect of Red...). The dialogue is nothing special, but it's nothing bad either. In fact, hearing Ash and Misty's bickering can be hilarious at times! Ash being stuck with this seemingly annoying character while Misty's stuck with an idiot who knows nothing of Pokémon battles! It would be better if it weren't for the Pokémon CONSTANTLY SAYING THERE NAMES AGAIN AND AGAIN!!! They could've gotten away with it, it's just how pokemon are or something, but instead it sounds soooo dumb like, Arkanine comes, giant fire breathing dog. Give it two more heads and it would be Cerberus! It opens its mouth: "Arkanine... Ark ark ark arkanine nine. Arkanine! Ark Arkanine! Arrrrrrkaanine!!! Ark..." and that's pretty much how it goes, making you ask, "If their vocal cords can do all of that to the point it sounds annoying, why can't they talk?!? Better off with Digimon, annoying voices, but they actually speak and it makes sense! Their data!" They should have kept the far more awesome roars from the games but ah well! Its Pokémon, it has to be let go.
Should you watch this? Well if you watched it as a kid and liked the games, knock yourself out! You'll love it! For a while. Did you watch it as a kid and admitted it wasn't perfect though liked it as a child, prefferered Digimon or Medabots, disliked the games, grew out of pokemon, or all of the above? I advise you leave this as a beautiful, golden memory that you can cherish for ever and ever, because if you open the windows to smell memory lane again, you may found somebody has just broken wind... As for me, I'll go back to seasons 1 and 2 of Digimon and enjoy myself immensly, or maybe even Xross Wars if I think I can handle multiple brain cells exploding at once (yes, its not pretty but can be entertaining) but Pokémon? No thanks, I'll save it for a rainy day. (show less)