>>53174830The anime staff probably wanted to keep things as simple as possible for kids and marketing, and giving Ash's Pokemon names could confuse the kiddies (even though a lot of Pokemon already say their names, not all of them do). But yeah, I get what you're saying; Ritchie's Pikachu is called Sparky, and that's a cute name, and it feels more personal than him just calling it by its species name. Same with Ritchie's other Pokemon like Zippo. It would've been fun to see what names Ash would've given his Pokemon over the years.
