Pocket Monsters The Arceus Who is Known As a God, Episode 4

Dogasu's Backpack | Episode Comparisons | TV Specials

Next Episode

Episode Stats:

Pocket Monsters: The Arceus Who is Known as a God" Episode 4: "The Miraculous Light! The Sinnoh Legend!"
Pokémon TV Special: "Pokémon: The Arceus Chronicles" (The 46:51 mark to the end)
Japanese Air Date: January 28th, 2022
American Air Date: September 23rd, 2022

Arceus' Judgment attack rains down, and while it misses our heroes it does manage to hit the Ginga-Dan's helicopter as they try to flee the scene. They're brought crashing down to earth, enabling Shirona's Pokémon to incapacitate them for the rest of the battle. With the Ginga-Dan executives out of the way Satoshi and his friends turn to Arceus to ask for its help to save the poor Headran inside the giant flame monster. Arceus seems to agree and starts off by using its Water Plate to create a massive water orb to surround the Headran monster. Satoshi, Gou, and Hikari, with the help of the Lake Trio, then propel themselves into the water orb and start to make their way toward the center of the beast. Using their various Water Pokémon's powers to cut through all the fire and heat, Satoshi and his friends eventually make it to the core where both Headran and the Flame Plate are trapped. They manage to free the Lava Dome Pokémon and, after making their way through a few obstacles, successfully pull Headran out of the belly of the beast. The flame monster, without a Pokémon in its core to power itself, quickly hardens into nothing more than an empty husk. The Flame Plate is returned to Arceus and the Creation Pokémon, along with the Lake Trio, return home. With Headran rescued and the Ginga-Dan ready to be delivered to the Sinnoh police, our heroes' latest research fellows mission comes to a close.

Thoughts
When I was sitting down to write the summary you see above -- a summary I assume 90% of you just skip over, probably -- I was struck by just how this is such a hard episode to recap. What in the world even happens in this episode?! Arceus traps the Headran monster in a giant Blitzball field (I feel like I'm really dating myself with that reference...?) so that Satoshi and his friends can Dragon Ball Z-fly their way into its belly (???), combine a bunch of different attacks in a way that I don't think makes any sense scientifically (isn't the fire / water / electricity also the exact same combination that caused an explosion in the second movie?), free a giant monster thing from a bunch of vines (???), and then carry it out? Was there...was Mr. Tomioka not able to think of a simpler, less convoluted way to wrap up this story??

I do find this to be the weakest of the four episodes because of how it call comes to an end. Using questionable science to pull a Headran out of some giant flame monster is already not super great, but then once everyone gets outside they just kind of watch Arceus and the Lake Trio leave the scene and...that's it! At the very least, having a scene where Hikari and Takeshi say goodbye to Satoshi and Gou would've been nice! I guess the time that would've been spent on a nice send off got used for that awkward montage at the end of the episode where we see random vignettes from the Pokémon Legends: Arceus game, a montage that probably wouldn't have been necessary if the show had done anything -- anything at all -- to promote the new games in any of the two previous episodes.

A lot of people wondered why Arceus doesn't ever speak human language in these episodes, but to me the reason is suuuuuuuper obvious. Arceus was voiced by a really huge celebrity in the Japanese version of the twelfth movie -- Akihiro Miwa, to be exact -- and so they probably just couldn't afford and/or get the scheduling right to have the same actor return. I doubt it's any more complicated than that. It could also have just been a prestige thing; Miwa-san will come in and do a voice for a Hayao Miyazaki movie or a Pocket Monsters film released in actual theaters, sure, but some little Amazon Prime web anime thing? A celebrity of that status probably has better things to do!

With the English dub, I do have to give credit where credit's due and praise the script in this special. It's like 99% perfect, seriously. After working on mostly 4Kids comparisons for years and years, where literally every other line has some random rewrite or a stupid joke shoehorned in or whatever, it's so refreshing to see the people in charge of the English dub actually translate the show for a change. The voice acting and the music are still problems (so like, 2/3 of the things the dub changes LOL) but at the very least the script is super solid.

Cut -- 40 seconds
Yes, the opening gets cut again, and yes, I'm reposting the screenshots for a third time.

Click on each image to view a larger version.

Cut -- 6 seconds
In the Japanese version, the footage of Arceus using Judgment from the end of Episode 3 is played for us a
second time at the beginning of Episode 4. This repeated footage gets cut from the dub.

This was obviously done to help edit these four episodes into a single movie.

Music Edit
We get four pieces of Japanese music in this episode:

Here are the four pieces we get:

"Wild Pokémon Battle 2" ~ TV Anime Ver. ("Pocket Monsters" The Animated Series Original Soundtrack Vol. 2, Track 12) plays while Ash, Goh, and Dawn have their Pokémon use Water-Type attacks inside the giant water sphere.
Nervous With Excitement ("Pocket Monsters" The Animated Series Original Soundtrack, Track 44), the only piece of non-video game music kept in this special, plays when Heatran starts to sink back into the center of the monster thing.
"~Opening~" ~ TV Anime Ver. ("Pocket Monsters" The Animated Series Original Soundtrack, Track 17) plays during the Pokémon Legends: Arceus montage at the end of the episode.
"Pocket Monsters BGM," which has not been released on CD, is played during the "movie's" custom-made ending theme.

Every other piece of Mr. Yuki Hayashi's background music in this episode is removed from the English dub.

Dialogue Edit
There really is absolutely nothing to mention, re-write wise, until we get to the very end of this special. Brock puts his shirt back on and flirts with this older woman:

Japanese (original)	Japanese (translated)	English Dub
タケシ　「勇敢なんて」	Takeshi: "You called us brave!?"	Brock: "You called me brave, Cynthia!"
シロナ　「はい？」	Cynthia: "What's this now?"	Cynthia: (gasps)
タケシ　「一件落着のお祝いに自分とテンガン山データなど…」	Takeshi: "And to celebrate this closed case we should go on a date together on Mt. Tengan, or..."	Brock: "And to celebrate this closed case, we should go on a date..."

The Mt. Tengan ("Mt. Coronet") mention gets removed from Brock's version of the pick-up line, probably due to mouth flap restrictions.

I also want to mention that immediately after this, Gou refers to Takeshi as "Takeshi-san" instead of just "Takeshi," which if you know anything about the Japanese language will understand this as an indication that Gou respects Takeshi. The English dub could have had Goh refer to Brock as something like "Mr. Brock" to achieve the same thing but that would have sounded clunky and unnatural and weird and so they just have him refer to him as "Brock" instead.

Cut -- 62 seconds
So when I talk about the ending theme for this particular episode, I think it's probably going to be easiest to start with saying that the Japanese ending theme got cut in this episode, just like in all the others.

You can see a full translation of those credits here.

But! What happens is that TPCi creates its own custom ending sequence for their "movie" by taking select illustrations from the ending themes of those four episodes and Frankenstein's monster-ing them into a brand new ending sequence. Here are the shots they ended up using and the episodes from which they came:


From Episode 1	From Episode 2

From Episode 3	From Episode 4

From Episode 4	From all four ending themes

And there we have it! TPCi's Pokémon: The Arceus Chronicles is a "movie" made by re-editing four episodes together with a terrific script but terrible acting performances and way too much replacement music. The original Japanese version was released on DVD back in August 2022 so if you have a chance I urge you to check that version out if you haven't already. The English dub gets some things right but in other aspects it, unfortunately, still has a long ways to go.

Previous Episode

Next Episode

This page was last updated on October 17th, 2022