Greninja already is weak. It doesn’t even try to stand up and resist the attack. Greninja is pathetic.
It was built up from the beginning to have Greninja defeat Charizard. Not having that happen in XY is blasphemy. Greninja is the ONLY Pokemon that should defeat Charizard. If any other Pokemon defeats that thing I won’t consider it a win for Ash.
I assume people want it to come back for a match, so something would happen with it.
Well, I guess that could work (heck, the Ash vs Drake battle is one of my personal favorites precisely because I loved its approach of teamwork>raw power), but I'm not sure if it would really be best to do that with Alain specifically, since his other Pokemon were shown to be plenty strong (except for perhaps Tyranitar and Weavile) even if not nearly as much as Charizard, so who knows if Ash would even have his whole team still unfainted by the time the lizard comes out. Besides, teaching Alain the lesson of "don't overrely so much on just one Pokemon" feels a bit too similar to the "power isn't everything" lesson that he already learned at the end of XYZ, so it might be a bit redundant and unnecessary.
I find it unfortunate how when OS battles got discussed in the old days that Drake gets completely overlooked in favour of the battle with Gary, but I think Drake's actual battle was possibly the single best the OS ever had when you consider both the battle itself and the battle's meaning.
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To be somewhat fair to Ash on this, Lapras was probably the only really viable option to use against Gengar: Pikachu and Squirtle were already worn out by their battles against Ditto and Onix respectively, and Tauros had already been tried out and failed rather miserably. Bulbasaur and Charizard were fresh, but the former had no attacks that would have been effective against a Gengar while with the latter Ash was probably simply reluctant to use so early into the fight since it was his main powerhouse, and it makes sense to not show your full hand until you're sure it's absolutely necessary.
The earlier Hoenn Gym Battles were hard to watch for me, due to Ash's team not quite being diverse offensively - case in point, Treecko was used for both Roxanne and Brawly and could only Pound or Quick Attack... I did enjoy seeing Pikachu roast Wattson's team though. I think Gym Battles began to hit their stride in DP, regressed a tiny bit in BW, but came back with a vengeance in Kalos.
It’s sad with the exception of Sinnoh that the gym battles are usually better than the league battles
And interestingly enough, the writers have taken the Ghost type's immunity in consideration when they wrote Ash's gym battle to Morty in mid Johto, and went accordingly, given that Noctowl used Foresight before attacking them with Normal type moves. The inconsistency of the Ghost type's immunity is really all over the place if you think about it.
That's one of my favorite battles because of this distinction. Not only did Noctowl get the (very much needed & appreciated) limelight, but the anime examined a somewhat uncommon yet highly effective strategy kids could emulate in their own battles against Morty with their own Hoothoot or Noctowl (and later Normal-types in Gen IV by extension); growing up, I admittedly didn't grasp the application of Foresight for Ghost-types when I had my Silver version until I saw Ash do it after I came home from school one day. It's something you don't see Ash utilize often strategy-wise within his battles, using moves akin to Foresight.
