Is anyone disappointed that Journeys will come to an end soon?

[Hidden Mew]

I certainly don't want them to just add Paldea into their region hopping list and call it a day. That was a huge reason why Galar was put on the sidelines and treated like an afterthought. I would hope that they wouldn't make the same mistake with Paldea. Since I don't see them doing the PWC again or Goh sticking around, I don't see them keeping the world tour gimmick once they wrap up the series.

 

[Insanish Danish]

I'm disappointed that Journeys is coming to an end without reaching its full potential. Journeys has been one of the biggest letdowns of the Pokemon anime for me precisely because everything was there that should have made it an instant winner in my book - the more laidback nature of Sun and Moon, going to various different regions, all the returning characters and cameos - but it has never once felt worth it or rewarding to me and has never lived up to the hype it promised (I still haven't forgiven them for what they did to Butch and Cassidy, my poor dears). So I'll be sad to see it go, but not for the reasons I should be.

 

[Turbo]

Disappointed? No this is around when it should end his based on the 3ish year's the series have had so far

But as in just not having journeys anymore? I'm a mix of emotions

As someone who does like journeys I do hope they do take the good the series offered and showed and take it with them to the next series, as despite so many complaints Journeys did a lot of good and had a lot of highs
Not that it didn't have lows (some I think is our of their control like currently with the breaks) but I think the lows are all fixable
(and personally I think this is a series I think will age better than most)

But I also don't want them to do a copy and paste of this formula with Gen 9 or do a Johto like extension in OS with Paldea as I think the nature of Project Mew and the PWC don't work as well back to back,

Because even in OS the way they “reset” Ash for Johto didn't flow as well to me

But I also don't want them to go back to the same old gym formula from OS-XY at least without a big overhaul as I know some people don't like this SM/JN formula as much but I don't think the solution is the gym formula l. That formula had so many issues for me personally I am not looking forward to it.



With what we know about SV, imo it seems that the game is taking a lot from journeys as it has the three different “routes” with gyms, (I forgot the second one) and (I forget the third one lol) which is very similar to Ash Goh and Chloe currently

So it makes me wonder if they're just going to improve on the Journeys formula with the “main” characters having different goals and are treated equally or will they not use the games as a structure reference similar to JN with SwSh and do something more original and implement Gen 9 like some Pokemon whenever they feel like it

I think with Journeys ending it makes me a bit more intrigued for the future as even now we have people thinking this is Ash’s last series so whether it's because you think it's ending ok a high or low I think it has a nice future but I'm going to be sad that Journeys is ending as I do like the series but this is a good time to end


(everything Gen 9 related is barring the behind the scene stuff that's going on there btw)

 

[Kurolegacy]

Not in the least. Journeys to me can be summed up with 2 words, wasted potential. As a 25th anniversary series, probably the only thing they did get right is character returns. Beyond that, far too much was relegated to off screen land, the world always felt small and empty even when going to a location from
the past, way too much time was spent in Kanto compared to everywhere else, too much of Go’s goal just felt uninteresting with them waiting too long to introduce Project Mew to try to pump some life into it, Koharu’s handling felt like an afterthought which is terrible since she’s the female rep this series, the nonsensical choice to turn the reserves into nothing more than cheerleader, again, in the 25th anniversary series, the half-assed handling of the PWC, the endless number of breaks, the list goes on. Honestly, it‘s time to shuffle the deck and draw a new, hopefully better hand.

 

[Galar Adventurer]

There were various things I liked about Journeys so it is somewhat of a bittersweet moment to see it go,
but I am looking forward to the next series. I just hope it doesn't have as much of a mixed reception as Journeys did.

 

[Emmy]

Everything must come to an end, thus assuming we go back to a standard adventure and not some kind of Journeys 2.0 then I will be sad to see the series go. The idea of a PWC was cool but the execution was lacking, Gou and Chloe are some of my favourite characters from the anime but I don't feel the writers did them justice and of course, the fact that Galar was sacrificed on the altar for a supposed anniversary series is a crying shame.

It's sad as generally I liked a lot of the episodes by themselves, but looking back as an entire season it never managed to come together as a whole.

 

[Nicolas721]

I'll miss greatly the character returns. It was fun to speculate how would they come back, how they had changed, whether they'll keep their VAs in the different languages, etc. and they finally made the anime world & story feel more cohesive and real, through I wish more characters had received outfit changes.

But everything else...meh. The PWC had many mediocre battles and an underdeveloped Ash team that felt more like TCG cards, and the less said about Ash's personality the better. I really wanted to connect with Goh but he was very inconsistent, and while Project Mew is good it doesn't have anything special that can't be replicated in regular episodes. Chloe is a good example of how not to write a passive protagonist who is waiting for their big chance, and the fillers were very mixed too, it felt like the more experimental ones were the worst ones. The world tour had potential, but not only there was too much Kanto, the other regions became a more boring version of their game versions to the point only a few episodes could count as using their locations appropiately and meaningfully.

I won't say "I'm glad we're moving on" until we know to where we're moving on, but wherever that is I hope the writers at least learnt something during this mess.

 

[DarkraiKnight]

You know, going into this series, I was so prepared to love it. It was gearing up to be everything I ever wanted. And yes, it turned out to be kind of a monkey's paw case and had more flaws than I expected, but that's okay. I can enjoy things while acknowledging that they are flawed (what a novel concept, I know). But the constant complaining about Journeys week after week after week, the sheer toxicity from both the people who liked it and people who didn't , the fact that even when an episode was actually good, people would ignore it or jump through hoops to find flaws...That was what really killed my enjoyment. So thanks, guys. Ash is about to fight Cynthia, and I barely even care anymore. Thanks a lot.

But you know what? It's not entirely really your fault. It's mine. I came into this fandom a naive fool. I thought that even with the Kalos League fallout, and all the controversies in the SM series, maybe there was some way we could all come together for an extended period of time and just enjoy being Pokemon fans together. Maybe JN could be the series to do that. But nope. It'll never happen, especially not now that our "dream series" turned out to be such a controversial mess. But even then, the possibility was slim to none, because this community sucks. Critique is fine; in fact, it's healthy. But at some point, the critiques became trite and annoying, with a side of infighting and general rudeness.

So while part of me is disappointed, most of me is thrilled to move on from this series and this whole generation, which I largely did not enjoy due to the same issue (except BDSP; I would have hated that either way). Hopefully, I shall be able to actually enjoy Gen IX by keeping in mind these three things: 1) the mainline anime/games will never be as artistically amazing as I and many others would like them to be, but that's fine, because I'm in this mostly to enjoy the Pokemon themselves, 2) there are other media out there that will satisfy my itch for consistently great animation, writing, etc., so Pokemon can do whatever and I'll just fall back on those other things if I'm not enjoying it instead of complaining about one franchise every week, and 3) interacting with the Pokemon anime fandom on this forum, Serebii and Twitter will suck the positivity out of my soul and render me unable to have fun with the show...so I won't do it anymore.

Auf wiedersehen, doods. Hope you fave fun destroying each other over Ash vs. Leon or whatever. DarkraiKnight, out.

(And yes, I am indeed very bitter about all of this.)

 

[RetroPokeFan]

Wasted potential...

wasted potential everywhere.


Goh's uninteresting goal (he's not bad character wise though),

Chloe turning into the most non-entity "companion" to the point where she may as well be replaced by a soggy ol' cardboard box for these later episodes,

Ash's non-existent and uninteresting collection of strangers with the kid himself not faring better characterization wise,

boring battles in the boring PWC that whilst had a decent start then slowly and steadily degraded to being about as exciting as watching a snail try to paint your shed... with The Three Stooges,

animation that's more One Punch Man - Season Two than Season One,

too much time spent on jolly wacky shenanigans like Marshtomps that are about to clip outta the Earth and creepy people who have fetishes for blue Pokémon than on stuff we actually wanted to see,

somehow making legendaries as boring as possible (Mewtwo may as well have not bothered coming back),

pretty much most of Galar entirely ignored with countless Pokémon not seen, places barely explored and turned into ghost towns and gym leaders/other folks who will forever be trapped in Game Only Prison (and no, having them suddenly make quick cameos during the Masters Eight won't make this any better).


And yet we did get plenty of returning faces (some hit, others misses) and a few enjoyable new characters so I guess there's that.

Journeys to me is just a disappointment, the equivalent of a crap direct to video sequel.
And it actually sucks too because when I first heard about this season I was actually kinda excited to see what they could do with such a wealth of regions at their disposal and when the series delivered every now and then, it delivered (the Alola episodes and Vokner's battle for example).

Instead it's only making me hope that Ash heads to Paldea and ONLY Paldea next series.

 

[SonansuMan]

The sooner I get to see Jessie allowed to catch Pokémon again the better

 

[Kurolegacy]

The sooner I get to see Jessie allowed to catch Pokémon again the better

Gacha was a mistake.

 

[Mr. MoonStone]

I'm ready for a new adventure tbh.

 

[LuxrayOfTheWild]

It honestly would be a horrible move to just continue Journeys and add Paldea into the mix. There's not much more you can do with Journeys. The PWC is almost done so its time for Ash to move onto something new. Goh is going to be done with Project Mew, so once they find Mew, he's either gonna go off on his own or he'll stick with them and continue off screen because what more is there to do after he finds Mew? There's nowhere to go with him after. Keeping him around to just catch Pokemon does not make for an engaging story and its probably why Project Mew was added and he spent less time capturing Pokemon than he did before. They completely wasted Chloe and there's nowhere to go with her. There is no good reason to continue these stories. Also, I don't want to see Paldea meet the same fate Galar did, with most of its characters, Pokemon, and the region itself being shafted.

 

[Weddingbells]

This is the 2020 calendar that they revealed in September 2019.

View attachment 163099

The calendar Silktree posted comes out this November and has the PM logo on it. Normally when a new series is about the start, the old merchandise line usually ends in the summer. But so far we have seen several fall products with the PM logo on it.

And we also so the pencil case with the anime art style and TV tokyo but no JN logo

And also the 2020 calendar not having the jn logo

I get where the whole calender speel is coming from. But I honestly don't think it's anything serious.

 

[Ricbolog]

The series is over, long live the series!

 

[SamurottMan]

Disappointed? No.

Excited? Yes (cautiously)*

I hope the next series gets its s**t together and knows what it wants to be. Between trying to promote Pokemon Go, Masters EX, a little with of SwSh and the whole 'world tour' thing, the series didn't really settle on its overarching theme imo. Ash's battles and path to Master 8 felt incosistent and unfulfilling. Go wasn't a good co-star, Chloe wasn't a good supporting character. The lack of a 3rd member in the group and the lack of a female character with a goal was a big misstep that the writers didn't fix.

All the nostalgia promises felt flat. Fan favourite game characters, who never made their anime debut, could've been showcased. Galar, its Pokemon and characters deserved better treatment. Ash's captures of Gengar, Dragonite, Lucario were the ultimate fan service and the writers trying to turn Lucario into a Greninja 2.0 proves that they were unable to come up with something new and rather rely on piggybacking on previous successes.

Issues with timeslot, staff change, covid might have pulled the series back, but let's not act like the series started on the right foot.

*Only if the next series changes the formula by giving Ash's goal better writing and characters with a consistent goal worth following every week.

 

[BigDocFan]

I will admit that Journeys had potential as an all-region series but was sadly wasted

Looking forward to seeing what Scarlet/Violet has in store for us

 

[jbmasta]

This should have been the perfect blend, the world tour of Pokémon, having both exploration and a home base so the best of both pre-SM and SM. Yet this didn't happen. It took too long to work past the teething issues, giving more screentime to Goh and his nebulous goal of Goh to Catch 'em All and also having a nebulous quality to Ash's goal because of how it seemed to be at the convenience of plot instead of something more structured like gym battles and to a lesser degree trials.

One of the staples of past series has been the personalities of the pokemon of the main characters, how they perform in battle, training and how they are in downtime. Journeys is easily the weakest for this because Goh never had a consistent team beyond the Galar starters (their treatment an issue in itelf). Team Rocket too suffered badly here, when this is the category they usually perform consistently in. The gacha mechanic with Peliper resulted in only Morpeko being a notable addition to the TRio, and that was usually Morpeko getting hangry, eating all their food, then getting hangry again.

It feels like the last third, starting from the introduction of Project Mew if I had to specify an episode, tried to play catch up by getting at least two dub seasons worth of episodes into a smaller runtime. We're looking at three months before the next generation games release, and we still have the semi-finals and finals of the Masters Eight plus the Project Mew climax, and in the past month it's been three clip show episodes and a week off. We're in the big finale to Ash's Journey's goal, and it's been over a month since the previous proper episode.

 

[jbmasta]

It honestly would be a horrible move to just continue Journeys and add Paldea into the mix. There's not much more you can do with Journeys. The PWC is almost done so its time for Ash to move onto something new. Goh is going to be done with Project Mew, so once they find Mew, he's either gonna go off on his own or he'll stick with them and continue off screen because what more is there to do after he finds Mew? There's nowhere to go with him after. Keeping him around to just catch Pokemon does not make for an engaging story and its probably why Project Mew was added and he spent less time capturing Pokemon than he did before. They completely wasted Chloe and there's nowhere to go with her. There is no good reason to continue these stories. Also, I don't want to see Paldea meet the same fate Galar did, with most of its characters, Pokemon, and the region itself being shafted.

I'd like the series to shift to more like Power Rangers or the Adventures manga, having new protagonists for each series but being open to past characters returning. It avoids having to risk nerfing Ash and Pikachu in terms of power levels while not writing them out completely and expanding a character roster for new and different kinds of interactions when inter-generational characters meet.

 

[PrettySylveon]

I do agree with the majority about how exciting the Paldea arc sounds. Not only am I excited for the new region for Ash, but I am also excited for the new game coming out. Pokemon Sword & Shield was the bomb.com, so I know that Scarlet & Violet will be the same. The new Pokemon designs seem exciting and I also can't want to still watch Ash's journey to becoming a Pokemon master.