d_s_t_e's Wattpad Reviews

Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon: Kalos Journey by GTMKM98 [Pokémon]

Ash and his friends have just graduated from Pokémon School, and Ash decides to treat them all with a trip to Kalos. Just before they leave, he runs into his old friend Greninja, and everyone knows it's the start of a fantastic journey.

This is a book that was clearly written for the fans of the Pokémon anime. It includes all their favorite characters on a brand new adventure through Kalos. As already stated, Ash reunites with his old pal Greninja, and he also reunites with Serena and many others he encountered in his past journeys. The battles and showcases are never ending and filled with mega-evolutions, Z-moves, and every other awesome thing a fan could wish for. Basically, the whole thing is just that: wish fulfillment for young fans of the anime looking for more.

Now, this is a great concept for a Pokémon fanfic, which is clearly shown by the number of readers who have shown an interest in it. However, that doesn't mean that it's necessarily written as well as it could be.

It's very heavy on telling rather than showing. The chapters are very short and are mostly just filled with statements of what the characters are doing. It's true that they're doing a lot of awesome things, but it's really difficult to get invested in the story or the events of it when the story doesn't slow down to give descriptions or develop the characters, and it very rarely slows down enough to show how the characters are feeling. All of this means that a reader has to do a lot of work with just zir imagination, and, even if zie is able to do that, it's bound to get tiring. Readers would care about the characters and what is happening to them much more and get much more excited if the author took the time to do some of this.

Besides this, the thing that troubled me most about the story is the way it treats the villainous characters. Forget about "Team Rocket's blasting off again!", Team Rocket dies. That's right. They die, just like that, and Bonnie ends up keeping the Wobbuffet so he can go on doing his funny bit of popping out of his Poké Ball. No one mourns them. No one is sad that they're gone. No one even seems to be bothered to have witnessed people's deaths. And Team Rocket are not the only characters to receive this treatment. I find this to be extremely troubling in a book that I see as being intended for a younger audience. There's a reason that Team Rocket goes cartoonishly blasting off in the anime; you can't just unapologetically kill off characters in a kid's tv show. Even leaving that aside, Team Rocket is definitely not shown to be one-dimensionally evil. Jessie, James, and Meowth have all had their moments of being good and showing that they care about people other than themselves and about goals other than stealing Pokémon and doing other nefarious acts. Does anyone really believe that they deserve to die? I firmly believe that an author writing for a young audience has an ethical imperative to promote good values like compassion.

As far as the technical side of the writing, I'll say that it's readable but not perfect. Taking the first chapter as an example, you can see capitalization errors, punctuation errors, and some minor dialogue formatting issues. The author also has an annoying habit of spelling "let's go" with a "z". I must say that the technical aspects of the writing are a much better quality than the pacing and the narration-heavy style, though.

Overall, it's a good concept for a certain type of fan, and I'm glad that some people have liked it. However, I'm troubled by some of the messages that it seems to support, and the style makes it difficult for a more general audience to truly enjoy.