I STILL think Alain is a Gary Stu. He was just too perfect. Never lost a trainer battle after his debut. He needed to be knocked down a few pegs after they sat there shoving down our throats how OP he and that absurd Charizard were.
Would you believe then that Charizard was entirely absent from the anime for over 6 years? There wasn't a single Charizard at all in the anime from the start of DP all the way until "The Fires of a Red-Hot Reunion!" (They're certainly making up for it now with a vengeance, though.)
GameFreak didn't really start pushing Charizard until XY came out, which is likely why it wasn't as prominent in the anime (he wasn't too important in AG, either) after the regional team concept came out.
To be fair (though the word "fair" is pretty loose in this context, I just couldn't think of a better term) the programmers did try their absolute darndest to ensure the Cinderace in Leon's team would look much weaker than his ace Charizard. And I don't just mean because Charizard is the one with the fancy Kaiju mode either, but because the Cinderace can't have Libero as its Ability (the main thing that makes it so good in the first place) and on top of that was given a pretty godawful moveset. Seriously, it runs both Quick Attack and Feint, talk about redundancy.
I would say that Origins Red's Charizard is just as bad if not worst then Leon's Charizard. On the case of the writers making every other pokemon look worse to make Charizard look good.
To the people who say that Ash’s loss was narratively justified because it shows Ash as the moral victor, I laugh at how wrong that is.
And this happened to a Pokemon with massive buildup and a new exclusive form.
To be perfectly fair: is that even that much of an unpopular opinion these days? lol, Idk, it seems that after the high of the Kalos League and the overall debates surrounding it died down in the following years, I see more and more of people having a similar opinion that this overall League wasn't planned well.
Being the one to receive the worst outcome? Yeah.
Yeah, Infernape didn't get a special unique form but he was being set up as the ace for most of DP and was allowed to skip the Tobias battle for whatever reasons, while I think the Greninja hype overload was mostly constrained to XYZ.
As per usual with Water Starters in the anime
The episode itself was competent and well-written. LIke I said at the time, the only real problem with it was that it was about Ach and Pokachu instead of Ash and Pikachu. Admittedly that's a pretty massive problem, but if she had developed a better grasp on the characters she's writing before next time she could have written some winners. She's not the only new writer to incorrectly represent the existing characters, so I suspect there was an issue with production materials somewhere up the line. Sure ,she could have studied up a bit more on the characters on her own, but if she writes for other shows and films etc. it's unreasonable to expect her to sift through over 1000 episodes to get character details when they should have been provided to her by whoever contracted her to write episodes and I suspect she and the new writers were not provided with these.
It was pointless because Greninja never won any big battles and got released so why did he even get it? I wish that Ash-Greninja had more impressive feats.
Exactly. That is the worst writing in Pokemon ever. Build up Greninja to be unbeatable when mastered. Have it’s most impressive feat (going toe to toe with Diantha Gardevoir) be when it’s not mastered and him lose to a Charizard that with the added power up he could of beaten. And then do nothing of note unlike Charizard and Sceptile and be remembered for a league loser and be released.
I get you’re upset about the loss, but I think you're taking it to an extreme in your posts pretty often. Just because Greninja lost its last battle doesn’t really erase all of the focus it got as a Froakie, Frogadier and all the focus other than the Alain battle. It still has plenty of impressive feats on hand.
It’s impressive feats aren’t as impressive as Charizard and Sceptile. The point is that Greninja doesn’t have a grand legacy of greatness that those two have. Yes Greninja had great focus even as a Greninja but that all went down the drain. It’s how you finish makes an impression.
I don't think that Greninja losing really affected its legacy, at least in the long term. Despite the disappointment with the Kalos League, Greninja is still an incredibly popular Pokemon and people still want to see it return in the anime years after it was released. As bad as it was that Greninja didn't get to defeat Mega Charizard X, I don't think that negates everything else that it did before and afterwards. Playing a key role in the Team Flare arc might not have been an ideal way for them to provide payoff for the Ash-Greninja hype, but it wasn't unimportant either just because of its previous defeat.
I mean, the fact that it lost to the most overpowered Pokémon in existence doesn’t invalidate anything else it did. It still has a form no one else had, and it still is the only water type of Ash's to evolve post Kingler, not to mention defeating a Pokémon it's water Shuriken has a 4x resistance to. Just because it lost to a living plot device doesn’t change the fact that it did receive a lot of extra stuff.
