The Diamond and Pearl Wallace Cup arc review
For the brief and short explanation of the tournament below, I've deliberately left out stuff that didn't add much to the plots, such as Team Rocket moments.
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The episode starts off on the morning of the opening of The Wallace Cup. Ash, Dawn, May and Zoey are planning on entering the tournament. May has travelled to Sinnoh to compete in the Wallace Cup. Dawn is feeling nervous about the contest due to her failing to make it past the first round in the last two contests she has entered.
The contest starts off with the appeals round. Ash, May and Zoey all go out feeling confident and put up a good performance in the appeal round. Dawn, despite being super nervous about the tournament to begin with, puts on a great performance in the appeal round. Dawn, May, Ash and Zoey all make it through to the last 16. This means they will all be back the next day to compete in the second round of the tournament. They're now also all rivals to each other.
The next day, after showing some interactions between the characters at the hotel the previous night, it's time to start the second round. Dawn's second round match is the first one to be show. She wins it easily with her Buneary. The episode then proceeds to skip the rest of the second round to battles to go straight to the third round. We're then shown the last few seconds of Dawn's third round match. She wins that match and is into the semi-finals. And so, next it was time for Ash's quarter-final match. The team of Ash and Buizel and up against a coordinator named Kyle. Ash puts up a great performance, even pulling off a great Ice-Aqua Jet domination. However, he ends up losing that match to Kyle. Meanwhile, May and Zoey win their matches to proceed to the semi-finals.
The third episode, after a brief recap of last episode's events, immediately jumps into Dawn's semi-final match against Kyle. She wins the match with Piplup. In the other semi-final, May beats Zoey in a very close match.
And so, it was time for the final itself. Dawn and May have a super close battle that ends up with Dawn just about finishing victorious. Dawn is then presented the winner's ribbon by the host, Wallace. Then, Ash, Dawn, Brock and Zoey all say goodbye to May as she leaves to carry on her journey in the Johto region.
My opinions about this arc.
This contest had some great moments in it, as well as some great rounds and interactions between the characters. The pacing of these episodes was good, and there was some good choice of soundtracks playing in the background during some contest battle scenes.
And the battle where Dawn beats May was neat. It was a great way for her to regain her confidence as a coordinator. It also gives Dawn a bit more of a story and important reason to win the contest. And the match itself had some great scenes and moves made by Dawn's Piplup and May's Glaceon. It was great seeing May's newly evolved Glaceon be in a contest for the first time in that form.
May returning to the show made the contest feel even more interesting. It was cool to see one of Ash's former travelling companions competing it in with a few newly evolved Pokemon. This made me feel interested to see what move-sets they would use.
The only thing I can think of that could of been better about this competition is that maybe we could have seen a couple more of the second round battles that were skipped. But the rounds we did see were very well animated and shown. So it didn't matter too much that some rounds in the contest were skipped.
I really liked this contest arc. I thought it
was cool to see May return and compete against Dawn. I feel May should have
returned to the Diamond and Pearl series again at some time. This was a fresh
addition to the Diamond and Pearl series that was both fun and interesting to
watch. I highly recommend checking out the Wallace Cup episode arc. It was a
great moment in the Pokemon anime
Page created 24/05/20.
