- Joined
- Sep 22, 2020
- Messages
- 2,479
- Reaction score
- 8,626
- Pronouns
- she/her
- Staff
- #3,341
I'm not sure if even Brandon using the Regis in battle was strictly necessary, seeing how literally all the Frontier Brains' rosters were altered anyway, sometimes even having completely different teams to what they actually use in the games (such as Spencer and Greta, the latter of whom was even straight up turned into a Fighting-type specialist in the anime despite not actually being one in the games. She does use Fighting-types, but literally only one per team, and in fact her most prominent Pokemon is ironically enough a Dark-type), and they even saw fit to remove Spencer's and Anabel's Legendaries altogether.The BF was odd though. You could argue they sort of needed Brandon to use the Regis but Noland's Articuno was rather left field.
With how Brandon was made into an archeologist, I think a team mostly or entirely made up of Fossil Pokemon or even have some sort of "ancient" theme would've suited him. He could've still had the Regis, but just doesn't use them in battle because he's aware of how unfair that is for challengers and he's also only catching them for study and plans to release them once he's finished with his research (of course in this scenario, Reggie wouldn't have lost to him anywhere near as badly), but then when Paul challenges him he insists on fighting the Regis because Paul is just that adamant to show his "inner strength", with Brandon initially being reluctant because Legendaries, but when he sees how badly Paul needs to be knocked down a peg he accepts. The rest is history.
To be fair to Dawn, she didn't have to deal with an action replay user steamrolling every Coordinator with his totally-not-hacked gods. Plus, while she may have technically scored higher than Ash in her goal, Ash did get a very crucial win over Dawn: he was able to defeat his primary rival whereas Dawn was not able to beat hers. In fact, pretty much all of Dawn's wins over Zoey are indirect in the sense that she's beat people who beat Zoey, but never actually got to beat Zoey herself.It's just as I posted above; AG Ash can defeat "roughly Elite" trainers like Frontier Brains with a good success rate while DP Ash loses every time he tries to fight one. His newbie companion even scored higher than him.
I understand not everyone thinks this way but I am very outcome focused in cases like this where the writing isn't consistent enough, so if they wanted me to think Ash improved in DP he'd have needed accomplishments in it superior to those he had in earlier series'--and he didn't. Both OS and AG gave him better concrete achievements.
As for the whole "was DP really a regression or not" discussion, I can perfectly see and understand both sides of the argument: like you said, Ash's accomplishments are on paper not as good as those in the Advanced saga, but one could argue they're more than made up for with how much the quality of the battles themselves shot up, the fact that DP is the series that had the most strategies used in battle and not just from the main characters either, a very well-written and compelling storyline for Infernape, and the fact that almost nobody ever gets oneshotted unless they're fighting a ridiculously powerful opponent (in fact, I'm pretty sure DP has the least amount of oneshots among sagas, but I could be wrong), which in turn makes battles much more action-packed and exciting to watch.
Oh, and DP's arguable regression being overlooked also probably has to do with BW coming immediately afterwards and doing an even worse regression that was also far more blatant. Plus, DP allowed Ash to actually end in a very high note (regardless of if it wasn't as high as Advanced) while BW infamously gave Ash possibly the most embarassing defeats he's ever suffered. In both the beginning and the end, funnily enough.