Ash's Worst Gym Battle

[Schemer99]

What do you think is Ash's worst gym battle? Personally I think it was his fight with Roxie. They made Ash look like a complete fool for having to use his entire team against a "superboss" right before the Unova League.

 

[CometCartoons]

The Elesa gym dude was totally unprepared for that.

 

[SammyW27]

Elesa, hands down.

Ash did one stupid thing after another, then won it all with a cheap shot...

 

[Daren]

The coincidental part of this thread is just as I passed it by the song "Kodachrome" was playing and reached the lyrics "everything looks worse in Black and White", then I open the thread and look what the first responses are all from.

However are we talking about worst gym as in "Ash looks worst" or "worst Gym episode"?

If it's the former I wanna offer a shout out to Saffron City.
First battle is utterly one sided, and then he and the others barely escape. Okay. But he insists on another match because he wants to enter the league so badly.
There are other Gyms in Kanto. We later see Gary had ten badges and quite a few were not from known Gyms. Ash could have gone somewhere with a non-insane Gym Leader after the first match.
So his plan is to capture a Ghost type to deal with her.
Unfortunately they are also part-Poison so this plan is pretty terrible even if Sabrina was a sane, normal Gym leader. Also there were no good ghost attacks back then but I'll allow anime/game divide and pretend maybe Ash knew Shadow Ball existed.
Anyways, he enlists the aid of a wild Haunter who is clearly flighty and unreliable but decides to go through with this already bad plan anyways, and it ends predictably poorly.
So why do I rate this lowest in terms of Ash's intelligence? Because the stakes are much more serious. Sabrina showed last time she's dangerous. Even if he was sure he could win with Haunter coming back was dumb and oh look Brock and Misty got turned into dolls and taken prisoner.

 

[KrspaceT]

The Kanto gyms rank fairly low because of how Shudo was originally approaching things. Probably would almost be fairer to split the listing.

Though yes Elsa was probably the worst post Shudo gym.

 

[Kurolegacy]

The Kanto gyms rank fairly low because of how Shudo was originally approaching things. Probably would almost be fairer to split the listing.

Though yes Elsa was probably the worst post Shudo gym.

To this day I still have no idea what they were thinking with half of those gyms. You’d really think that if you don’t know if your anime is going to get more than one season and its job is to advertise the games, you’d want to put on some good gym battles. Instead, we get 3 legit badges earned and the rest were either given to him for something other than winning or through circumstance. I just can’t wrap my head around it over 20 years later.

 

[KrspaceT]

To this day I still have no idea what they were thinking with half of those gyms. You’d really think that if you don’t know if your anime is going to get more than one season and its job is to advertise the games, you’d want to put on some good gym battles. Instead, we get 3 legit badges earned and the rest were either given to him for something other than winning or through circumstance. I just can’t wrap my head around it over 20 years later.

Well a certain Shudo did want to have a Pokerevolution end point at some point. Somethimg I still don't get myself (What would Ash do to Pikachu to make him want to rev. Shudo!Ash was not the gentleman that modern Ash was, but he and Pikachu were good friends. I can only imagine some scenario that makes Pikachu's revolutionary end goals come off like The Room level angst against Ash)

 

[0cerge]

In my opinion Gym battle against Wattson was worse than Elesa's. At least against Elesa Ash used some tactic, rather than triple KOs in row.

 

[Fan of Jarrus]

Well a certain Shudo did want to have a Pokerevolution end point at some point. Somethimg I still don't get myself (What would Ash do to Pikachu to make him want to rev. Shudo!Ash was not the gentleman that modern Ash was, but he and Pikachu were good friends. I can only imagine some scenario that makes Pikachu's revolutionary end goals come off like The Room level angst against Ash)

He did not like writing battles in a series about battling creatures.

 

[Kurolegacy]

He did not like writing battles in a series about battling creatures.

Thus raising the question, why take on such a series in the first place?

 

[Rocket Messiah]

I have to say that all the Unova Gym battles were rather... simple

Specially when in three of them pokemon evolved mid battle.

 

[Venomaid]

Ash versus Elesa, Wattson and Erika. Damn I just noticed that 2 of his worst gym battles involved Electric gyms.

 

[Daren]

Thus raising the question, why take on such a series in the first place?

I've wondered this myself. He seemed a poor fit in many ways although some of his ideas worked well (Meowth would constantly prove invaluable to the writers), but snippets of translation from his blog suggest he was continually frustrated by meddling from above.
I suspect if someone else had done the show it would be drastically different even after he'd left per the butterfly effect. I suspect Ash would be a lot closer to Red, for instance--he'd be more of an "ace" from very early on. Not sure how this would affect the leagues though...

 

[Johtohfiller]

Thus raising the question, why take on such a series in the first place?

He had worked with Yuyama before. But yeah, dunno if it was Shudo's influence entirely but Kanto was written closer to a pure comedy, with the battling aspect not taken seriously much of the time.

Anyway, I'll go with Elesa - they didn't have any "still figuring out how to make monster battles work" excuse by that point.

 

[KrspaceT]

I've wondered this myself. He seemed a poor fit in many ways although some of his ideas worked well (Meowth would constantly prove invaluable to the writers), but snippets of translation from his blog suggest he was continually frustrated by meddling from above.
I suspect if someone else had done the show it would be drastically different even after he'd left per the butterfly effect. I suspect Ash would be a lot closer to Red, for instance--he'd be more of an "ace" from very early on. Not sure how this would affect the leagues though...

Honestly Shudo left a lot of interesting ideas....it is honestly a single area he left a problem. Ash.

I like the guy, but his call on making him the vanilla guy did and still does cause problems.

 

[Galactic_V]

Kanto's gym battles are interesting on how they're so much different from the games (calling back to Monster Ball = knocked out, most status ailment = knocked out, attacks without specific order, overuse of non-moves (who remembers the "electric tail" move Pikachu used to defeat Raichu?) . Of course we still have differences nowadays (mainly how many Pokemon you're obligated to use in each match), but they relate to the source material way more. Because of those I'm ignoring Kanto.

For worst battle ever I'm between Tessen and Kamitsure. The latter it seems just a really big cheat and the former the portrayal was awful, as if the writer of that episode dumbed Satoshi down to extreme levels just for sheer comic-relief (his strategy and how they don't work is sorta funny, I guess, but he isn't supposed to be this dumb).

 

[KrspaceT]

....You couldn't just call them Wattson and Elesa so we don't have to bulba-search for translations?

 

[Greninjaman]

....You couldn't just call them Wattson and Elesa so we don't have to bulba-search for translations?

Yeah. I dislike it when people use Japanese names without putting in the English names. Makes it hard to follow what is being said.

 

[Galactic_V]

We're allowed to use both here in Bulbapedia. Besides I've been playing the games in Japanese ever since gen VI, so I'm way more used to use names in Japanese by now.

Not mentioning I also get confused when reading them in English.

 

[LuxrayOfTheWild]

Elesa....Just Elesa. First off, Ash went into this expecting to rely on Palpitoad and when that went wrong, he was totally unprepared. Secondly, the whole battle in general was just poorly done. Elesa is infamous for Volt Switch and we never got any of that Volt Switch chaos. Instead we got a Tynamo with TACKLE.