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Review SM136: Rising Fire! There's More Than One Rival!!

A great finisher of Gladion for throwing the fire disc just in time to save Silvally. Also, Guzma taking the lost for the first time growing over frustrated that he had never been that before.

Overall: A
 
Felt a bit cheap Silvally managing to survive because Gladion used the Fire Disc just in the nick of time to make it a Fire Type

Was so great to see Torracat being used in battle, I might be wrong but this could be the first time Torracat has won under Ash's ownership in a long time

Guzma looked so angry, can't wait for next week's episode with the animation dream team

Team Rocket were pointless as ever but even more pointless was the Bewear/Stufful scenes, they were cute at first, only for things to get repetitive
 
The first half contained a lot of reused scenes and extended shots to clearly pad out the runtime, but the second half was better.

Nice strategy to get Silvally stuck in place for a Z-Move. Too bad Gladion had a counterstrategy.

Nice! We get to see Guzma's trophies in the anime too!

I think Scizor just gave us the anime debut of U-Turn.

Poor Scizor. Didn't get much to do here, did it?

Guzma looks like he's going to explode. And based on the preview, he will.
 
Pretty good second half, but the first half was shall we say, less than stellar. The conclusion to the battle was barely long enough to blink and not miss it, then Hoshi just disappeared without saying goodbye to her brother or anything, all so we could have an interminable scene with Bewear that went on and on and on with reused footage all over the place. At least the PokéProblem segment elaborated on Hoshi's departure, but of course people watching the dub won't get to see that so Mimo will just disappear from existence at the ad-break. I wouldn't be so bothered if the Bewear scene hadn't been utterly pointless, and wasted what felt like at least 40% of the segment time that could have been spent either giving Hoshi's League visit closure or giving us a decent battle conclusion.

Fortunately however Matsui was able to pull herself together during the ad-break and deliver some good battling with Guzma, with a nice use of the not-often-seen-in-the-anime switch strategy, which was great to see. Emergency Exit's bad timing also didn't feel at all out of place and worked in well with the structure of the episode and Guzma's character arc.

2/10 at most for the first half, 8/10 for the second.

Also nice to see SM Ace Trainer, ORAS Youngster and Lass get some screentime in that one crowd scene near the beginning of the episode, probably the only good thing from the first half apart from Plumeria's scene.
 
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Guzma: sends out a Bug/Steel type against a Fire type
Bug/Steel type: loses
Guzma:
Image result for surprised pikachu
 
Guzma: sends out a Bug/Steel type against a Fire type
Bug/Steel type: loses
Guzma:
Image result for surprised pikachu
Guzma knew Scizor was weak to Torracat's attacks, so he used U-Turn to switch it out, only for Golisopod to later use Emergency Exit when it felt threatened by the incoming Fire Blast and force Scizor out, leaving it no time to dodge the attack. It wasn't Guzma's fault, it was Golisopod's.
 
Guzma knew Scizor was weak to Torracat's attacks, so he used U-Turn to switch it out, only for Golisopod to later use Emergency Exit when it felt threatened by the incoming Fire Blast and force Scizor out, leaving it no time to dodge the attack. It wasn't Guzma's fault, it was Golisopod's.

I know the context. :rolleyes: I just thought that the whole scenario was hilarious, especially Guzma's rage.
 
Agree that the second half of this episode blew the first half out of the water. Frankly, I don't know why the anime is so desperate to end League episodes on obvious cliffhangers (even the little kids must have known that Gladio would beat Kaki) only to finish the battles off in just one move. Anyhow, it gave some space in the episode for us to get to see Kojiro geeking out about engineering again so plus points for that! I understand why people might find the bears scene annoying, but I think the repetition is the point - the bears are utterly trapped in a cycle of carefree hedonism which is allowing the TRio to remain in Manalo undisturbed.

Gusokumusha throwing Hassam under the bus and Guzma losing his shit was absolutely what I have been waiting for all this time and I was not disappointed. I'm excited to see the conclusion of this next week under the fabulous team of Omode, Asada and Iwane.

I have an issue with the anime portrayal of Plumeri who since her debut has done pretty much nothing but trail after Guzma wearing a soppy expression on her face, soliloquising about how bad it's going to be when the s-h-i-t hits the fan. I remember her in the games being a strong character of her own who played a leading role as the big sister of the gang. In typical anime style, that has been thrown aside so she can be a purely supporting act to Guzma. Why does the anime always gotta do interesting female characters this kind of disservice? sighs
 
Has this entire league happened in one day?

Turtonator forgot Shell Trap to learn Focus Blast? I suppose it’s the end of the series so it doesn’t matter. Sillvally vs Turtonator was alright, not as good as the battle with Lycanroc but decent.

I like that Scizor was OHKOed by Fire Blast, exactly how it should be. I like that the cracks in Guzma and Golisopod’s tough guy show are becoming more conspicuous. Great start to the battle.

Oh, and I like how Nanu is suddenly making sure to really check if a Pokemon has fainted.
 
The end of the Kaki vs Glazio battle was quite disappointing. Even with Silvady having a fire drive inside it, I'd still expect it to take some damage instead of just standing there like Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi. Also, I'd expected to see Glazio finish the battle with Silvady's Z-Move, so was disappointed to see Bakugames go down to a basic Crush Claw was disappoting. Also, guess Bakugames lost Shell Trap? Pity, I liked that move.

I do like how the referees are now checking to make sure a Pokemon is actually knocked out since the Mokuroh debable.

Oh, you can tell we're time wasting when we spend a good couple of minutes seeing Kiteruguma and Nuikoguma chilling out still. We get the point, show. They're sufficiently distracted.

Things really picked up at the Satoshi vs Guzma battle though. It amuses me that U-turn is presented as a dirty move given how many competitive players use it as standard in their movesets. Gusokumusha throwing Hassam under the bus to save itself was an interesting development, guess it doesn't care as much about Guzma or its teammates as it does about itself (Guzma should have taught it Frustration, huh?).
 

Where did you get that?

....That sounds like Ash wins, and oddly that makes me both excited, and scared.

It also means I wasted 34 dollars getting this thing made

commish__mob_mentality_by_blueike_ddefzy6-pre.jpg


DeviantArt

@MegaGreninja
1) That has nothing to do with the comment you replied to.

2) It's an obvious fake.

...The titles at least sound Translated dorky enough.
 
A great finisher of Gladion for throwing the fire disc just in time to save Silvally. Also, Guzma taking the lost for the first time growing over frustrated that he had never been that before.

Overall: A
 

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I get the feeling the Kiteruguma scenes got repeated this episode for budgetary reasons. The show's been having to animate battle-heavy episodes nonstop for about two months now, and it didn't take its usual July movie break, and they're not able to recycle footage as much as they used to (when was the last time we saw the Rocket motto?), and they're having to employ an entire series' worth of voice actors for basically every episode now, and they're probably busy trying to plan out the Sword & Shield series, and...

It's not surprising the show's taking shortcuts whenever it can.
 
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