>>55341432Tomioka is the anti-Shudo. He's a writer who clearly enjoys the task of writing and does it a lot, so while every episode and movie Shudo did is at least interesting, Tomioka has quite a bit more variance. He wrote 3/4 of Ash vs. Kukui and all of Ash vs. Leon, but he also wrote Hoopa and Volcanion, and those are war crime levels bad. That being said, his output is insane. Not only was he series comp for nearly 500 episodes (counting MPM and unofficially Battle Frontier), but just in terms of episodes, about 1/5 of the Ashnime's runtime was written by him, including the Mega Evolution specials and five movies. Whereas Shudo hated writing battles, Tomioka thrived on them, making them somewhat legitimate in the face of all the ways that the early series writers misunderstood Pokemon battle mechanics. He did not write "aim for the horn," but he did write Charizard throwing Magmar into a volcano. He and Shudo worked well together for that reason. Ditto for Tomioka and Aya Matsui through Battle Frontier and DP.
Tomioka's character flaw is that he likes long arcs, but they only pay off when he's writing all of them. Shudo was the king of making episodic shows with long term payoffs for fans who follow the details. He could write his episodes and keep a vague timeline of what details need to go where, and then go hands off, which works for Pokemon. Tomioka's arcs tend to feel disconnected or underdeveloped, because he probably has a clear idea of what he wants, but unless he micromanages its development, which he often can't for Pokemon, the end result is weak. Compare early XY, where a lot of character arcs have random starts and stops, to late XY/AlainTeam Flare, where he wrote every important episode outside of the League. Same series, same series comp and director, but wildly different outcomes.