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Pocket Monsters The Arceus Who is Known As a God Episode 2 |
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Episode Stats:
Pocket Monsters: The Arceus
Who is Known as a God"
Episode 2: "Headran's Explosive Start!!"
Pokémon TV Special: "Pokémon: The Arceus Chronicles" (The 15:13 - 31:02 mark) Japanese Air Date: January 21st, 2022 American Air Date: September 23rd, 2022 Satoshi and the others are near Kurogane City when they notice the Pokémon in the area acting as if they're in distress. After calming them down with a quick battle our heroes are approached by the Legendary Pokémon Agnome, Yuxie, and Emrit! The Lake Trio wants to deliver a message from the Mythical Pokémon Arceus that seems to have something to do with a great flame but is too vague for our heroes to fully understand. Later, our heroes head to a nearby Pokémon Center where Satoshi and Hikari are randomly reunited with their old traveling companion Takeshi! The former Nibi City Gym Leader heard about what's been happening with the Pokémon nearby and decides to go with Satoshi, Gou, and Hikari to Mt. Tengan to try to figure out what's going on. That evening, the Ginga-Dan begin their work to open the gate to another dimension. During this live run, the energy generator they're using overloads and bathes Headran in a strange energy that causes it to transform into a giant magma monster! The giant Headran begins to mindlessly lurch toward the Spear Pillar, leaving destruction in its wake. Satoshi and his friends catch sight of the giant Headran and rush to get ahead of it so they can try to cut it off using their Water-Type Pokémon. Right before they can get started, however, the Ginga-Dan executives arrive on the scene! Will our heroes be able to get past the Ginga-Dan and stop Headran's rampage?! To be continued!
Thoughts
A common complaint about this four-parter is how it feels more like a promotion for Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl, games that had already been out for two months by the time these episodes came out, than it does for Pokémon Legends: Arceus. And yeah, I have to agree with this. Don't get me wrong, I love seeing the Ginga-Dan again after all these years and their undying devotion to their old boss. And I do love how the story revolves around Headran, a Pokémon who's been criminally underutilized over the years. But to go through an entire episode without even a passing reference to Pokémon Legends: Arceus is just so bizarre to me. Then again, the Pocket Monsters (2019) TV series is set in "all the regions" and yet something like 80% of the episodes take place in the Kanto Region so I guess "completely missing the point" is just normal for the staff at this point. Takeshi's in this special, which is nice in a "reuniting the old Diamond & Pearl gang" kind of way, but why is he only just now making it onto the show? Pocket Monsters (2019) is, again, a series set in "all the regions" and his voice actor Yuji Ueda's is still a regular on the show (he's the voice of the Rocket trio's Sonansu, among others) so it's not like they couldn't have found a way to make it work. He should be a recurring character, no? But even more strange than all of that is how Takeshi apparently has his own little jet plane that he can use to just fly around the city...? Like...Takeshi has a plane, you guys. He knows how to pilot it. If someone's Pokémon is too sick to bring into the Pokémon Center then they can be like "oh don't you worry, we're going to send our fifteen-year-old doctor-in-training to your house to take care of it. Your house can accommodate jet plane parking, right?" The entire thing is absolutely BONKERS, and something I love about this episode is how literally everybody just kind of goes along with all of it as if this is the most normal thing ever. The English dub is very light on actual changes, which makes my "job" a lot easier. Every now and then I'll get people asking why the overwhelming majority of the comparisons I do these days are of 4Kids era episodes, and while there are several reasons for this one of the major ones is that there just isn't as much to report on when TPCi's behind the wheel. There are still edits and rewrites and whatnot, sure. But if, for example, I were to combine these four Arceus comparisons into a single page then the resulting comparison still wouldn't be as long as your average 4Kids era episode. The two are just on different levels. I do still have problems with the current dub (I'll cover one of the major ones in the next comparison) but, at least as far as making episode comparisons go, these TPCi ones are pretty easy. The Lake Trio, Dialga, and Palkia keep their Japanese voices. Cut -- 40 seconds The entire opening sequence to the episode is cut in order to make this seem more like a "movie" for English dub viewers. There's some great stuff in here but unfortunately dub viewers don't get to see any of it. Music Edit The music replacement in this episode is still pretty abysmal but at least we get some Japanese music in this one. The two pieces that get kept are both from Shinji Miyazaki:
Visual Edits The text that identifies the setting of the first part of the episode as Kurogane City (クロガ ネシティ), or "Oreburgh City," gets removed. I feel the need to speak up about this one in particular. This one piece of text is literally the only way we know where in Sinnoh this episode takes place, as none of the dialogue in the episode explains where everybody is, and yet it gets removed without anything put in its place. Would the five seconds it takes to type out "Oreburgh City" have really been too much to ask? Dialogue Edit Goh scans each member of the Lake Trio:
The
main thing to bring up here is that the English dub changes each
Pokémon's description from "God of
___" to "Being of ___."
This is also a great example of how liberal the Japanese version is with the use of the word "god," which is part of the reason I chose to translate the name of these special episodes as "The Arceus Who is Known as a God" rather than "The Arceus Who is Known as God." Arceus is just one of many, many deities in the Pokémon World! You wouldn't know that if you only watched the English dub, though, based on a combination of how literally every single mention of the g-word gets removed from the franchise and because of odd localization choices that make Arceus seem more like "the deity" than it really is. Ash tells Goh about his travels in Sinnoh, something he's apparently never brought up before...?
Something that'll come up a few times in these episodes is the dub referring to Azelf, Uxie, and Mesprit as "the Lake Guardians" when the Japanese version only ever refers to them as "Agnome and the others." Japanese fans will sometimes refer to the trio using nicknames like the "Three Lake Fairies" (湖の三妖精), the "Three Lake Beings," (湖三体), the "Three Lakes" (三湖), etc. but, as far as I can tell, all these nicknames are just fan creations. Officially, the trio is just known as "Agnome and the others" (アグノームたち). The narrator will do the same thing when he's recapping the events of the Diamond & Pearl TV series later on in the episode ("Ash, his friends, and the Lake Guardians stopped the plan") while in Japanese it's just "Agnome and the others." Cut
-- 62 seconds
The ending credit sequence is removed for a second time. You can see a full translation of those
credits here.
The Next Episode Preview tease is also removed.
This page was last updated on October 17th, 2022 |
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