>>39554585SM is comedy focused and instead of traveling the region, most of the series takes place on Melemele with a slice of life approach. They do travel to other islands but it’s mostly to the same locations or stock cave, beach, and forest area. There isn’t much of an adventure aspect, just really random events occurring that the main cast get involved in. Battles for the majority of the series were far and few, and the ones that did happen were 9 times out of 10 extremely short, underwhelming, badly animated, or all of the above.
The character cast is also bloated to the point most characters don’t get their time to shine until now which is the tail end of the series and still it’s barely anything or feels extremely forced. There’s a lot of games characters who don’t appear until late, and if they did appear early, they either only appeared that one time, get a very blink or you miss it cameo, or there is a large gap before they show up again.
The episodes are also badly paced, with again, events happening at random, Ash seemingly taking on the trials whenever he feels like it, plot or important arcs are rushed, and plot points that may or may not be important are either forgotten about or don’t actually get brought up again until way down the line. Going back to the comedy aspect, it’s not always bad but most of the time it feels very force or hammed in just for the sake of. Characters make a lot of different faces that are either exaggerated or referencing something and the entertainment factor from that really varies. Finally, the most controversial aspect of the show is the animation and art style. The art style can be an immediate turnoff depending on the person, mainly due to the simpler designs, roundish proportions, and lack of shading. The animation is 100% the best it’s ever been, but the consistency is the problem, as most of the time there are only small moments in the episodes that are actually well animated.
