My introduction to Pokemon Adventures was as a child when I read Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum. I loved it, so I decided recently to read it from the beginning starting with Gen 1. I enjoyed RB&G and Yellow a lot, so I was very excited for a new arc, especially with its 90-chapter length, as I hoped that it would have better fleshed out characters, as my only real complaint about RB&G was how short it was and how little time there was to connect with some of the characters. I was very excited to read this new arc and experience Johto.
My biggest issue with this arc was the characters... again. Gold is charismatic but every interaction that he has with Silver or Crystal (which there are not many of) is abrasive or argumentative until the very end, which I will get into when I talk about the ending. Silver is a non-character. He is kinda like Blue in RB&G, but the difference is that the arc is over twice as long and Silver has no characterization besides being edgy up until the end when they exposition dump a backstory for him and Green with only a few chapters left that does more to establish Green as a character than Silver. Crystal is probably the best character of the main three, but the story doesn't really know what to do with her. She shows up almost a third of the way through the arc and then you don't see Gold or Silver again for the next 24 chapters. There is also this thing where Crystal is a strong, independent female character which is awesome, but then upon her first failure to capture a pokemon she is now unable to do anything by herself and needs to be yelled at by her mother in order to get back on track. As I said, the story seems confused about Crystal's role, as she starts out this strong femal character, then becomes a crying mess, then goes into a training montage, then gets saved repeatedly by Gold, and then has essentially no agency in the final battle (the handling of female characters in this arc is weird as a whole, since Misty is also present and is chosen by Suicune, only to get beaten up by the villain, fail to capture him, and then gets ditched by Suicune. The only well-handled female character is Green, but she is literally one of the protagonists of a previous arc so that completely undercuts the new cast of characters).
The main villain, Pryce, is another of my big issues with this arc. When the Masked Man is introduced, he is a decently imposing villain. He shows up in Ilex Forest, then again at the Lake of Rage, then he fights Surge, then he just...goes away until the final battle. He captures Lugia, sure, but you don't see him do it and you don't find out that he did it until later. He has no presence in most of the arc, yet at the end when it's revealed that it is Pryce, a character who has been in only a couple scenes, we are supposed to be blown away. There is also the issue of his powers. Pryce creates ice sculptures that he explains his pokemon can move and puppeteer, yet at the end of the arc he creates ice clones of himself and controls them freely without the use of any of his pokemon, which means that Pryce must be able to create ice. I know that Sabrina is a psychic, but ice-based powers do not seem to have any precedent in the story. His motivation is also kinda lame, and we only find out about it like a chapter before he is defeated. Two of his Lapras's which he loved dearly (so much so that he gave them almost identical names) died in an accident and it made the third Lapras sad, so he decided to go back in time using the power of Celebi to bring them back. It's okay, but again, we don't know the masked man, we don't know Pryce, and a chapter after we learn about this, the arc will be over, so there is little reason for us to even really care about this backstory of his.
The final battle was absurd. This is a pokemon story about Gold, Silver, and Crystal, so logically the final battle should revolve around Gold, Silver, Crystal, and their pokemon. It doesn't at all. Gold fights Pryce, who doesn't use his pokemon but instead ice puppets, and to stop Pryce's henchmen from getting to Celebi, it isn't any of the protagonists of this arc that do it, but instead Red, Blue, and Green riding the legendary birds of Kanto. Then when Pryce shows up and enters the time dimension, Gold, Silver, and Crystal are all together for basically the first time and then decide to work together and go into the portal to stop Pryce. They go in, there are a bunch of flashbacks of the characters arguing because they never had actual positive interactions with each other before, they reminisce fondly, then Silver and Crystal turn around and Gold defeats Pryce by destroying the pokeball that holds Celebi and then escapes the time portal offscreen. Pryce hears a song as these Lapras's that we just met are reunited, Gold slaps Green's ass on accident, and the arc ends.
I still want to keep reading this manga, I still had some fun at points with this arc, but this was just a real bummer in a lot of ways. The story was nonsensical in ways that I'm not even going to get into right now, the new characters were a mess and had no agency in their own story, and the main villain and final battle were just bizarre.
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