>>45775906> What's your opinion of special?"it's cool until it isn't". The first few storyarcs are decent shonen adventure manga as long as you get over the writer cannibalising the cast of existing named game characters to fill the ranks of villainous antagonists. Adapting the story of Ruby/Sapphire to a slightly edgier shonen manga format seems really cool at first but that particular arc ends up jumping the shark hard with the ending being a textbook deus ex machina that reveses literal character deaths. The rest of the gen 3 arcs are pretty interesting in how they present the new features of their source material (frlg and emerald) and connect to past arcs and conclude the story thus far in a neat way.
After this point mileage may vary. Characters still have quirks and cool and unique stuff does happen, but as I recall Diamond/Pearl follows the original game plot more closely. Then there's some rushed short storyarcs to cover the other gen4 games and by Black/White you really start to feel the writer's pressure of wanting to write what he wants while also hitting the major story beats of the games, which have been getting more involved plots in the meantime. Then there's the constant need to advertise the features of the games getting in the way; it was handled rather elegantly back in the day with stuff like Gold's newly hatched Pokemon saving the day, but the reader is constantly bombarded with contrived ways to make shit like fucking Entralink relevant. The final nail in the coffin is the series being unable to keep up with the pace of making one arc for each game release, with arcs being both delayed and rushed to their ends.
tl;dr just let Kusaka make what he wants goddamn
