POCKET MONSTERS SPECIAL: GOLD, SILVER & CRYSTAL
STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
Not Available
RELEASE
Invalid Date
CHAPTERS
90
DESCRIPTION
This chapter features the journeys of Gold through Johto trying to at first search for the ones who stole his backpack and uncovers that the ones who stole his backpack are planning something. Two other new Trainers come into the plot of the story, Silver, whose life is tied in with the villains of this series, and Crystal, an average Pokémon Trainer with a staggering talent in catching Pokémon who later helps Professor Oak catch all the Pokémon to complete his Pokédex. Along with these three, the original 3 Pokédex holders come back to help these three along with Yellow. With their aid, will Gold be able to stop the reformed Team Rocket and the Masked Man's nefarious schemes?
(Source: Bulbapedia)
CAST
Red
Yellow
Gold
Blue
Green Okido
Silver
Crystal
Kasumi
Natsume
Yukinari Ookido
Wataru
Sakaki
Hayato
Katsura
Mask of Ice
Karin
Tsukushi
Minaki
Anzu
Matis
Shijima
Shiba
Professor Utsugi
Itsuki
Lambda
CHAPTERS
RELATED TO POCKET MONSTERS SPECIAL: GOLD, SILVER & CRYSTAL
REVIEWS
TheSoggyCrisp
A Delightfully Deviant Mess!Continue on AniListWhat can I say about this arc? I almost feel unqualified to even review it since its been a while since I read it. But why is that the case? I remember the first two arcs very well yet GSC somehow seems to have left the least tangible impression on me. Is this the fault of me or the arc not living up to what came before? That's what I hope to figure out with this review. My muddied thoughts on the third arc of 'Pokemon Adventures' an arc full of great highs yet those highs possibly failing to match the carefully crafted highs of the greats that first got me into this manga. So a good place to start I guess is the characters. Adventures has so far done an excellent job with distinct characterisation for all its main players and this arc is luckily no exception. Gold right from start introduces himself far differently than Red. He has tons of personality, clear motives and quirks and is overall a joy to read. He plays off the characters around him beautifully and due to a good underlying moral compass he never truly becomes overbearing (unlike certain later characters) due to his more good natured side coming forth throughout the story. The gym leaders while may not being as well used as the kanto ones still offer good counterbalances with the rest of the cast and still get some good screentime. On the topic of gym leaders the kanto vs johto tournament was an awesome addition that helped keep me engaged throughout the story. But back to the characters, the protagonist of the second half of the arc 'Crystal' is even better than Gold in my opinion. Her role is well executed, she has good characterisation, a good arc and overall carries the story even more than Gold. Our third dex holder 'Silver' isn't quite as well executed. I still liked him but much like Blue it felt like more could be done, granted his story doesn't quite end here but for what they do with him here considering all the time spent on him he feels kind of boring. His story is ultimately carried by Green who along with Red and the others return during the later stages of this arc for one hell of a conclusion. So that's about it for the main characters. There are still some other smaller ones but to be honest they didn't leave much of an impression on me... Especially our villain this time around. With Giovanni he was as we remembered him from the games but he was at least well executed. But Pryce... He's just a mess. An absolute shit show of a reveal that destroyed the pacing of the story. It was so bad that before it was revealed he was our big bad I had convinced myself there was no way the story would be this predictable but yet we got exactly that. This manga's stories are simple but at least with previous arcs it has crafted a more down to earth world but this is just silly. His design is really cool and his motives on paper are cool but not enough is done and in the end he just never truly yet that opposing of a villain. This is a shame as I feel alot of what this arc attempts is cool on paper and with a better villain perhaps without a dumb "plot twist" maybe it could have been one of the best. However how it stands this arc especially its second half is a really enjoyable but ultimately exhausting ride that has alot of highs while leaving sour forgettfulness after the readthrough is done. It isn't bad but doesn't quite match what came before.
Sabotower
A Disappointing Mess After Gen 1's HighsContinue on AniListMy introduction to Pokemon Adventures was as a child when I read Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum. I loved it, so I decided recently to read it from the beginning starting with Gen 1. I enjoyed RB&G and Yellow a lot, so I was very excited for a new arc, especially with its 90-chapter length, as I hoped that it would have better fleshed out characters, as my only real complaint about RB&G was how short it was and how little time there was to connect with some of the characters. I was very excited to read this new arc and experience Johto.
My biggest issue with this arc was the characters... again. Gold is charismatic but every interaction that he has with Silver or Crystal (which there are not many of) is abrasive or argumentative until the very end, which I will get into when I talk about the ending. Silver is a non-character. He is kinda like Blue in RB&G, but the difference is that the arc is over twice as long and Silver has no characterization besides being edgy up until the end when they exposition dump a backstory for him and Green with only a few chapters left that does more to establish Green as a character than Silver. Crystal is probably the best character of the main three, but the story doesn't really know what to do with her. She shows up almost a third of the way through the arc and then you don't see Gold or Silver again for the next 24 chapters. There is also this thing where Crystal is a strong, independent female character which is awesome, but then upon her first failure to capture a pokemon she is now unable to do anything by herself and needs to be yelled at by her mother in order to get back on track. As I said, the story seems confused about Crystal's role, as she starts out this strong femal character, then becomes a crying mess, then goes into a training montage, then gets saved repeatedly by Gold, and then has essentially no agency in the final battle (the handling of female characters in this arc is weird as a whole, since Misty is also present and is chosen by Suicune, only to get beaten up by the villain, fail to capture him, and then gets ditched by Suicune. The only well-handled female character is Green, but she is literally one of the protagonists of a previous arc so that completely undercuts the new cast of characters).
The main villain, Pryce, is another of my big issues with this arc. When the Masked Man is introduced, he is a decently imposing villain. He shows up in Ilex Forest, then again at the Lake of Rage, then he fights Surge, then he just...goes away until the final battle. He captures Lugia, sure, but you don't see him do it and you don't find out that he did it until later. He has no presence in most of the arc, yet at the end when it's revealed that it is Pryce, a character who has been in only a couple scenes, we are supposed to be blown away. There is also the issue of his powers. Pryce creates ice sculptures that he explains his pokemon can move and puppeteer, yet at the end of the arc he creates ice clones of himself and controls them freely without the use of any of his pokemon, which means that Pryce must be able to create ice. I know that Sabrina is a psychic, but ice-based powers do not seem to have any precedent in the story. His motivation is also kinda lame, and we only find out about it like a chapter before he is defeated. Two of his Lapras's which he loved dearly (so much so that he gave them almost identical names) died in an accident and it made the third Lapras sad, so he decided to go back in time using the power of Celebi to bring them back. It's okay, but again, we don't know the masked man, we don't know Pryce, and a chapter after we learn about this, the arc will be over, so there is little reason for us to even really care about this backstory of his.
The final battle was absurd. This is a pokemon story about Gold, Silver, and Crystal, so logically the final battle should revolve around Gold, Silver, Crystal, and their pokemon. It doesn't at all. Gold fights Pryce, who doesn't use his pokemon but instead ice puppets, and to stop Pryce's henchmen from getting to Celebi, it isn't any of the protagonists of this arc that do it, but instead Red, Blue, and Green riding the legendary birds of Kanto. Then when Pryce shows up and enters the time dimension, Gold, Silver, and Crystal are all together for basically the first time and then decide to work together and go into the portal to stop Pryce. They go in, there are a bunch of flashbacks of the characters arguing because they never had actual positive interactions with each other before, they reminisce fondly, then Silver and Crystal turn around and Gold defeats Pryce by destroying the pokeball that holds Celebi and then escapes the time portal offscreen. Pryce hears a song as these Lapras's that we just met are reunited, Gold slaps Green's ass on accident, and the arc ends.
I still want to keep reading this manga, I still had some fun at points with this arc, but this was just a real bummer in a lot of ways. The story was nonsensical in ways that I'm not even going to get into right now, the new characters were a mess and had no agency in their own story, and the main villain and final battle were just bizarre.
kempokid
Has some cool ideas, but ultimately falls a bit flat compared to previous arcsContinue on AniListGetting to the Gold, Silver and Crystal chapter of Pokemon Adventures was pretty exciting from the get go to me, seeing an arc that was as long as the previous 2 combined, based on the game that had 2 regions collide, it seems like it was setting up one of the most ambitious and largely scoped bits that the manga as a whole would explore, and while that ultimately proves to be true to an extent, I couldn't help but feel that the way it was handled felt a bit off in the end, as if too much was going on at once without a true sense of focus. Immediately the reader gets introduced to 2 new main characters, both of which prove to be a bit more entertaining overall than their counterparts from the Kanto region, being far less generically heroic and bringing forth a really chaotic energy to their interactions with the world that brings a very unique flavour to the way that the Pokemon world is explored. I also like the way that this doesn't try particularly hard to follow that standard "trainers beat the gym leaders" concept this time around either, with them acting almost exclusively as important and powerful figures that have a lot of sway on the events without even being framed as an obstacle in the slightest. The pacing for the first section is also rather good, with the rivalry between Gold and Silver feeling like a more constant and bitter presence, with almost everything that each of them do being brought back around to attempting to upstage and bring down the other one, all while never forgetting to show just enough common ground between them so they're not just total enemies. It's a good dynamic that feels pretty well conceived and a great way to drive the plot forward.
The issues with pacing really reveal themselves after the first stretch of the arc when we're introduced to the 3rd protagonist, Crystal however. After having this fast paced, intense scramble in the first section, a certain big event happens and then the perspective changes to her instead, completely ignoring the presence of these other two characters for quite a while. It essentially feels as if it resets the narrative and makes the reader go through another escalation while knowing in the back of their minds that there's an entire other plotline that hasn't been touched in ages. It overall just feels like a very poor way of handling interweaving plotlines when there's really not much of actual crossover for a decent chunk of time past this. It ends up making the entire middle section of the arc feel extremely plodding, further exacerbated by the fact that it feels as if there's also a lot of focus spent on the other goings on in the 2 regions explored here, with a bit too much going on for it to feel as if it all fits within 90 chapters. There are also a few other issues, such as the fact that the villain reveal of this is framed as a huge twist when it's the most obvious thing ever, the fact that the climax of the arc feels pretty weak, with the section directly beforehand feeling like a far better collision of all the forces in play. Still though, despite the pacing issues and some really poorly handled concepts sprinkled in throughout, this still does some things extremely well and manages to be another fun Pokemon adventure, even if it's not quite as good as the others thanks to its glaring flaws and general sense of biting off more than it could chew.
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SCORE
- (3.85/5)
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