Pokémon Horizons Is Struggling

Pokemon Horizons Roy Fuecoco and Wattrel

The last time I wrote about Pokémon Horizons, it was arguing that the new Pokémon anime really needs an official sub. At the time, I mentioned I’d been watching the Japanese episodes as they aired, through methods that don’t need to be brought up here, and that I was enjoying it a lot. Two months on, I’m not so sure, and the latest episode has me really concerned about the future of the new series.

Pokémon Horizons started with a fairly strong premise. There was this girl, Liko, who was given a mysterious pendant by her grandmother, and for some reason, a group of villains wanted that pendant. To keep her safe, Liko’s mom hired a group of skybound adventurers, the Rising Volt Tacklers, to watch over her and keep her out of trouble.

Liko decided she wanted adventure, so she joined the Volt Tacklers and started traveling the world with them, trying to uncover the secrets of her pendant. Along the way, she met Roy, an energetic boy with a mysterious ancient Poke Ball, and Dot, a reclusive streamer who generally hates going outside. The three of them work together with the Volt Tacklers to investigate the pendant and the appearance of a black Rayquaza that appeared from Roy’s ancient ball, which seem to be linked in some way.

That sounds pretty good! But there have been a few issues along the way that, in hindsight, were kind of red flags. The first is that, once Roy and Dot were in the mix, the balance of characters and how much time was dedicated to each was thrown off. Liko had a lot of screen time before Roy joined the time, but she started getting less and less once he boarded the Brave Asagi.

Dot took the focus for a good three or four episodes, then was promptly shoved into the background with the rest of the Volt Tacklers. For a brief moment it seemed like Dot might have been a third primary protagonist, but that idea seems to have gone out the window.

The biggest red flag (prior to the most recent episode) popped up in a duo of episodes a few weeks back. The episode starts with Roy’s efforts to teach a Wattrel how to fly, is interrupted in the middle with a random fight between Professor Friede and a bad guy, and then ends with a cliffhanger of Liko getting hypnotized and her pendant stolen.

The second episode has an amnesiac Liko wandering through a city, struggling to remember who she is or what she’s missing. Dot and Roy come to the rescue – a big moment for Dot – there’s another group of baddies that turn up, the hypnosis guy is defeated without much effort, and all is well. It’s a messy duo of episodes that feels like it’s trying to fit season-long storylines into 40 minutes, while also kind of achieving nothing at all.

It pales in comparison to the latest episode, though. I won’t spoil too much, but the gist of it is that Liko and Roy are tasked with taking down a legendary Pokémon that’s angry for… some reason. It’s never really explained. Liko decides her path as a trainer is to understand Pokémon and their emotions, but then resolves the situation by having her Sprigatito hit the Pokémon in the face a few times.

It’s a typical Pokémon solution, but in a series that has tried to buck trends since Ash’s final journey in the Pokémon anime, it feels very safe, and not particularly clever. It’s especially egregious as Liko didn’t really try to understand why the legendary was angry, not even with her recently caught Hetanna, the emotion Pokémon capable of sensing and altering emotions. She claims to want to understand and help Pokémon, but her path to doing so seems to be beating it into submission, and that’s just not interesting.

I also think having the bad guys introduced so early on in the series has been to its detriment. What we’ve seen of the evil group is confusing and nonsensical, with far too many characters and motivations that either don’t make sense or aren’t explained at all. Team Rocket was straightforward: they were bad guys, and they wanted Pikachu because he was rare.

These new baddies? I couldn’t tell you what they want, why, or even who the hell they are. But they’re present in almost every episode, doing increasingly weird things and then being rapidly defeated. When there are already rampaging, giant, legendary Pokémon wandering about, you don’t really need a team of evildoers to create tension, you’ve got enough going on already.

Pokémon Horizons is nearing the end of its first arc, and that’s a good and a bad thing. Having gone so far off the rails in recent episodes, there’s a good opportunity to course correct going into the second arc. Give Roy something to do that isn’t just chasing after a Rayquaza. Give Liko a purpose and actually follow through with that in a logical way. Give Dot literally anything to do at all.

On the flipside, with 23 episodes under its belt, you can’t put that genie back in its bottle. Pokémon Horizons has unleashed a litany of messy story elements, and it’s beholden to resolving those elements, even to its own detriment. I’m not sure you can make it less messy at this stage, so we’re bound to get a few more episodes going forward that just kind of suck like this most recent one.

Still, when the character work is as strong as it is, I really want to assume the best for the future of Pokémon Horizons. I enjoy Liko as a character, I love Roy and his singing Fuecoco, I adore Dot and the rest of the Volt Tacklers. It has so much potential, and to see that potential wasted would be devastating.

There’s no English release date for Pokémon Horizons yet, though it is supposed to start before the end of the year in the US. Hopefully, by the time it does, I’ll be able to report that it’s worth a watch.