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Review S15 EP31: Caution: Icy Battle Conditions!

garrison-san

someone in the dark
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BW079 - Bulbapedia, the community-driven Pokémon encyclopedia

Ash and friends have arrived in Icirrus City and Ash is eager to battle Brycen to earn his Freeze Badge. Ash chooses Krokorok to start the battle, a move which surprises Brycen as ground types have a disadvantage against ice types. Brycen sends out his Vanillish, and the battle begins! Will Ash have what it takes to defeat Brycen and his ice type team?
 
Ash's mid battle revelation about why Krokorok wanted to battle was about the worst line there's been in a while - He wants to battle a strong Pokemon so it can be a strong Pokemon? Duh! Surely there could have been something more interesting to put the Krokorok-Beartic rivalry down to, how about wanting to overcome the type weakness? Perhaps point to how Krokorok responded to the waterfall in the previous episode and how Ash knows he wants to overcome that sort of thing. Anything to make it more unique than 'Krokorok wants to fight a strong Pokemon' - isn't that why he wanted to battle Pikachu? So why did it come as a shock to him, mid battle, that Krokorok might think that about another Pokemon?

Otherwise, I liked this episode. Apart from the atrocious title, it's a good gym battle, each of Ash's Pokemon got a decent go of things rather than the usual BW pattern of one of Ash's Pokemon falling quickly just to help a single Pokemon storyline along. Any episode with Axew and Scraggy is always great, this being no exception. One minor thing was Ash telling Pignite to aim Fire Pledge, the move doesn't come across as something that looks particularly controllable by the Pokemon after it starts - so it's strange that it is possible to do that. I'd have liked it to miss slightly on the first hit, but send Cryogonal flying into another part of the Fire Pledge, it would have been a bit more realistic than Pignite being able to perfectly aim for the centre of a Pokemon.

I liked the voices that Vanillite and Cryogonal had. I also think Iris added far more to this episode than Cilan did - even if Iris seems to cheer for Ash's Pokemon moreso than Ash himself. Cilan's comments were the bland 'bad taste' ones that could be thrown into any episode.
 
HOLY CRAP MAGIC FLYIN' BEARS!!! :OOOO

I think Axew was underdressed for this episode, as a lot of Brycen's ice attacks were encompassing the whole field. Axew actually is a Dragon Type Pokémon, those moves technically were kinda like hitting him, he was liable to get hurt. In addition, how did Iris and Axew get dressed so fast?

This battle was just a little on the cheap side. I don't know how Krokorok was able to get back in the battle, coulda swore he was knocked out at some point, probably gonna have to check the tape on that one. But I'm probably remembering wrong. Still, by the time we got up to Beartic, after fighting Vanillish, Krokorok should've been ragged. And Beartic, I don't think, took a single hit from Pignite in the prior round. So when it was Krokorok vs. Beartic, it was one Pokémon with a FLAWLESS VICTORY, and one Pokémon who had, at best, barely scraped out a win against a lower tier challenger. I mean, did you see that Icicle Spear earlier? That looked brutal. Right in the guts. But somehow Krokorok pulls the win out against Beartic with one Stone Edge. Beartic gets hit with one Stone Edge and is out of commission? After the way he schooled both of those Jellicent at once?

Finally, Ash got his 7th badge. But why did Brycen ask him which gym he's going to next? There's only 8, right? Process of elimination leaves only one more gym to go in the region. But then again this hearkens back to how Gary Oak had, like, 10 badges. Canonically there's probably more than 8 recognized and accredited gyms in all of Unova, or any one region. But I still maintain, his badge case only has 8 slots, and they're all fitted for specific badges, so what choice does a trainer have?

Comin' down to the wire. Don't tell me what comes after this, I don't wanna know yet. But Ash only has one badge to go and then it's the Unova League. This went by fast, it surely can't be over yet. I'm thinking maybe something like Battle Frontier is coming now.



EDIT: Also, I must've missed it, but I don't remember this episode being called Caution: Icy Battle Conditions. I must not have been paying attention, a lot of memory issues with this episode...
 
A strong gym battle, almost up to Sinnoh's standards really.

Sure, I agree that one line about Krokorok was pretty weak, but other than that, it all flowed well I thought. Benjamin Becker, aka the voice of Brycen sounded more relaxed and into it this week.

I particularly liked the imagery of Pignite smashing into Cryongonal with flame charge, only to be rebuffed with reflect. It just seemed to have impact didn't it?

I stated it before, but I feel like Mizuho Tajima perhaps deserves a bit of recognition for this ep. Many thought it would be animated poorly, and while it wasn't the prettiest ep, not many animation directors would have gone through the time of drawing Iris and Axew in their snow uniforms I think.
 
I had mixed feelings about Today's dub episode. The dub music was absolutely abysmal. We got 7 pieces of the original music kept:

Piece at the beginning
Title Screen
Krokorok vs Vanillish
Scraggy vs Vanillish Part 1
Scraggy defeats Vanillish
Krokorok slaps his own cheeks
Krokorok's Trump Card

I'm sure we all saw this one coming. The Best Wishes Instrumental Theme is replaced with the Rival Destinies opening and the Black and White End Credits Theme during the Krokorok vs Beartic battle was replaced as well.

On a positive side, to my surprise, Cryogonal's dub voice is actually good! It almost has the same voice as its japanese voice (including having the same vocoder effect).
 
I had mixed feelings about Today's dub episode. The dub music was absolutely abysmal. We got 7 pieces of the original music kept:

Piece at the beginning
Title Screen
Krokorok vs Vanillish
Scraggy vs Vanillish Part 1
Scraggy defeats Vanillish
Krokorok slaps his own cheeks
Krokorok's Trump Card

I'm sure we all saw this one coming. The Best Wishes Instrumental Theme is replaced with the Rival Destinies opening and the Black and White End Credits Theme during the Krokorok vs Beartic battle was replaced as well.
On a positive side, to my surprise, Cryogonal's dub voice is actually good! It almost has the same voice as its japanese voice (including having the same vocoder effect).
I'll get a percentage when I do my music comparison, but quantity wise that's better than the last 2 weeks.
 
I had mixed feelings about Today's dub episode. The dub music was absolutely abysmal. We got 7 pieces of the original music kept:

Piece at the beginning
Title Screen
Krokorok vs Vanillish
Scraggy vs Vanillish Part 1
Scraggy defeats Vanillish
Krokorok slaps his own cheeks
Krokorok's Trump Card

I'm sure we all saw this one coming. The Best Wishes Instrumental Theme is replaced with the Rival Destinies opening and the Black and White End Credits Theme during the Krokorok vs Beartic battle was replaced as well.

On a positive side, to my surprise, Cryogonal's dub voice is actually good! It almost has the same voice as its japanese voice (including having the same vocoder effect).

I'll give you that, the battle scenes with the dub soundtrack were underwelming but that ending theme after krokorok won! it's soo beautiful, there's no way anyone would even want to hate something so perfect.

Anyways i thought this episode was amazing, loved the dub voices for cryogonal and vannilite and to my surprise beartic knew ariel ace :eek: anyways 9.1/10
 
Loved this episode. My favorite battle of the whole BW saga so far. I didn't mind Ash's line about why Krokorok wanted to defeat Beartic. Yes it was corny but Ash says stuff like that all of the time. This isn't anything new really.

Someone mentioned that this battle was up to par with a Sinnoh gym battle, I agree completely. The battle quality was awesome. Brycen is a very good gym leader, easily the strongest Ash has battled. The fact that Ash had to come up with two good strategies, something we've seen him do before especially against a really tough opponent, shows how strong Brycen is.

On a related note, seeing Ash be strategic was refreshing. I feel like BW has lacked that. It was good to see the old Ash again, having to come up with an off the wall but clever strategy to win. Can't wait for the next gym battle.
 
You know what the sad thing is? If this episode had aired during Diamond and Pearl we would have all seen it as a nice but standard Gym battle. However, since its aired during Best Wishes it becomes one of the sagas best battles. Type-matchups, decent movesets, strategy, a move improvised from a memory of a past battle; pretty much D&P's calling cards.

But yeah, this was a pretty good episode and a pretty good dub (Ash's mid-battle speech about Krokorok's reasons for wanting to win not withstanding).
 
Actually, I expected better of this episode. Of course, I did like that Ash appeared to be pretty strong today and employed a lot of thinking for a change. But there were two scenes that were particularly important for the outcome of the match but done very badly if you ask me.
The first one was the strange fact that Pignite was able to perfectly hit the center of a wildly and fast spinning Pokemon with Fire Pledge, a move that was presented as hardly controllable.
Secondly, and this is my major point of criticism, Beartic went down way, way too quickly. In its introductory episode last week, it was portrayed as an extremely tough, badass Pokemon that seemed to have no problems whatsoever taking down two Pokemon simultaneously. Now in this battle Beartic had only been "injured" by one Stone Edge and Dig attack, before Krokorok took it out with a rather unorthodox version of Stone Edge. Since the last move wasn't even a proper attack, I highly doubt that Beartic could have been defeated so soon if that scene had been written correctly.

But all in all still a good gym battle.
 
You know what the sad thing is? If this episode had aired during Diamond and Pearl we would have all seen it as a nice but standard Gym battle. However, since its aired during Best Wishes it becomes one of the sagas best battles. Type-matchups, decent movesets, strategy, a move improvised from a memory of a past battle; pretty much D&P's calling cards.

Dat's cuz BW's gym battles suck eggs most of the time. Hooray for being somewhat enjoyable the 7th time around! n_n
 
This episode almost made me believe that Ash gone back to his DP Self!
But I guess it was to good to be true .
Writer sometime shows Ash like a Rookie , Sometime show him like his DP self.
I have no idea what they are doing.
 
This episode almost made me believe that Ash gone back to his DP Self!
But I guess it was to good to be true .
Writer sometime shows Ash like a Rookie , Sometime show him like his DP self.
I have no idea what they are doing.

I really though the writer knew how to make Ash's Dp self shine in these episodes. I said the the same thing when I first saw this episode. It is one of the high points of Ash's gym leaders challenges.
 
Can I just say how much I love Brycen's dub voice? I mean he is spot on <3 He made this and the previous episode even more enjoyable. I like Cryogonal too.

Oh yeah. I think it was kind of mean of Iris not to share the information that she got from Nurse Joy about the Gym being cold Ash and Cilan could dress appropriately like herself.
 
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