“The Arceus Chronicles” is one of the few Pokémon outings (it’s promoted as a movie, but it’s really more of a mini-series) that I consider legitimately bad, and would not recommend to even to fans of the franchise. It could certainly be worse, and there are those that will enjoy it, but I would suggest spending your time with one of the recent alternate universe movies instead.
Thematically, I’m not sure what the project was going for. It seems like it was supposed to be a tie-in for the Legends Arceus game, but very little from the game makes it into this, outside of a recreation in the early part of the film. Instead, the story mostly focuses on an attempt by members of Team Galactic to rescue Cyrus (their leader) from the dimensional rift he was imprisoned in during the Diamond & Pearl generation of the anime. This is a fine premise, but conflicted with my expectations of a time-traveling adventure back to Hisui, which I think would have connected better with the first part of the special.
The animation is okay. It’s clearly a step up from a regular episode, but not on the level of what one of the full-fledged animated Pokémon movies would have gotten.
Pacing is what really dragged this down for me. It really does seem like they had to pad things out to fit the target run time, and I wanted this to end 5-15 minutes earlier than it did, even when I was watching it with other Pokémon fans at Worlds 2022 in London. There simply wasn’t enough action or character development to keep me interested.
Musically, I don’t think there was much memorable about the score, nor were there any vocal songs. As is usually the case with the TV show, much of the Japanese score was replaced, but as someone who hasn’t found the work of Shinji Miyazaki and co. particularly interesting as of late, I’m skeptical it would make much of a difference, regardless of quality.
Pretty much the only thing I can say this special does well is bring back characters from the Diamond & Pearl arc of the TV show. If you wanted to see Dawn, Brock, Cynthia, or their Pokémon, they show up, though I can’t say they were used in a particularly interesting way.
Part of me really wants to know what happened with this project. It’s possible the writers weren’t allowed to use as much material from the Legends Arceus game as they wanted, or that multiple ideas were pitched and this is the result of some sort of compromise. Whatever the reason, it seems very likely that this wasn’t given enough time and other resources to coalesce into an interesting product. As I stated earlier, do yourself a favor and watch one of the alternate timeline movies instead (particularly “The Power of Us” or “Secrets of the Jungle”, which could use some more attention). I can’t guarantee you’ll love them, but the odds definitely seem better.
-Steven "Yoshi" Reich, Poke Press Editor
