That's funny to hear me as a Pokemon anime hater. Dude it was my first anime and I still love the better parts of the original to this day.
The problem here is that they didn't replace it with something worthwhile. There's always cast songs and they've been ass lately since most of them lately haven't been sung by Rica Matsumoto who is an actual singer. Why should I care if Roy and Liko rap some low tier song?
They aren't flexible at all. Liko has just this side of zero motivation for anything and has to be on some kind of crazy air ship receiving constant encouragement to even consider doing anything. Roy is just some retarded kid who happened to find a GS ball equivalent and gets rewarded for retardation such as his gym battle (probably the best ep despite that). Freide is an arrogant jobber. Dot is a boring weirdo. The others on the ship barely have a personality to note.
Yeah I said Captain Pikachu is cool. That's it. Freide in his own story isn't and the fact that the air ship was just slapped together is more weird than funny.
There's no nostalgia to be had here because they've largely thrown away most of Pokemon's own appeal and while the visuals are pretty okay, the animation like any other show depends on the episode. OLM has openly stated that they've been in a pretty rough state since the Masters 9 tournament. It's probably coming more under control now, but it's a sign that they lost some staff even if they're clearly branching out beyond kids anime once more.
Anyways just for comparison's sake put this series up against the original anime. Yeah it totally slaps it from a production point of view, but it gets slapped in turn in terms of content. In this same equivalent episode we got the kaiju-sized Tentacruel episode. I'd rather go back and watch that one twice.
