BW 078 "Hachiku Appears! The Holy Mountain of Ulgamoth!!" Review Thread

Hachiku Appears! The Holy Mountain of Ulgamoth!!



Animation - Team Kato
Screenplay - Yukiyoshi Ōhashi
Storyboard - Yūji Asada
Assistant director - Takenori Kawada
Animation director - Masaaki Iwane



As Satoshi and his friends make their way through a mountain on the way to Sekka City, an avalanche of rocks comes falling their way! Luckily, the Gym Leader Hachiku is training nearby and is able to step in and save them with his Tsunbear. He later tells everybody that he was once a star in a set of movies known as the "Ice Trilogy" which, of course, piques the interest of Dent the Movie Sommelier. Suddenly, the sky turns dark, so Satoshi-tachi and Hachiku head deeper into the mountain. Before long, they see a Pokemon Hunter named Rinzoh and his two Bluengel going after Ulgamoth, the guardian of the mountain! Satoshi sends out his Waruvil to protect it but Rinzoh just takes it instead! What will Satoshi do now!?

A cool episode, but it sucks that Volcarona didn't get to do anything.

At least it had this adorable scene.

yea cool ep, though underwelming volcarona debut

Yeah, the lack of any good Ulgamoth screentime was disappointing.

I also wish Rinzoh was even half as cool as J was. Like, he was alright, but his boring character design pretty much guaranteed that we'll never see him again.

Love the episode! Was really good done!!
I missed a bit more Ulgamoth action! but what goes around comes around! He will star in an other episode!
Jellicent were quite nice as well! Hopefully Ranzo will reappear but in a one on one against

First half was funny with Dent fanboying and Satoshi trying to imitate Hachiku, but the hunter plot was dull and felt very much like a requisite Rocket plot of yore. So Dent, Satoshi and Waruvile were funny in the beginning, didn't really care for anything else. Hachiku was okay.

Pretty good episode. The scenes with Ash/Krokorok were funny. Meh on the hunter dude. I do hope Volcarona get's another appearance after his lackluster one here.

Why not having the TRio instead of a dull Pokémon Hunter? They have also proven they can fill a worthless half of the episode or even just two minutes.

Episode was okay though. Ash and Krokorok were awesome in this episode.

Dent. That's all I have to say. The opening of the episode was the best part *shot* I like Krokorok in this episode though. Especially the part where he didn't want to go in the water.

The episode started out very good, but then just went to disappointing territory with a dull villain character that's not very interesting (the TRio can certainly prove that they are better than that, and they always fail), and Volcarona barely did ANYTHING at all. I'm going to give this episode a 5/10, but the Krokorok scene made this episode somewhat DECENT, I can give you that...

SATOSHI USED ROCK SMASH!

It is nice to see Krokorok in action again, but something nags at my mind: this is the Ash that trains alongside his pokes all the time? The one that even trained alongside Oshawott so he could carry the stone scalchop? I know the gym leaders are supposed to be awesome, but somehow I think the old Ash would've at least showed promise, or kept at it until he could pull it off as well as Brycen.

This episode, outside of Krokorok finally doing something after its miserable loss in the previous gym, was meh. It simply felt like Brycen wasn't too good of a character to be introduced in his own episode, and that a hunter and Volcarona subplot were added in just to keep the episode going for another ten minutes. I don't care too much that Cilan was "fanboying" over Brycen; he seems to be a Connoisseur of almost anything or anyone that is relevant to the series. Everything went downhill after the second half. Was that Volcarona just captured because it was there? It would have been a better resolution if the Volcarona actually did something relevant to the episode.

One good thing came out of this episode. We finally got to see moments between Ash and Krokorok that did not involve Pikachu in the mix. Even though I welcome this aspect of the episode, I am still surprised that Ash would send out his Krokorok to train with Brycen and his Beartic. Was it ever explicitly mentioned in the episode why Ash made this decision? He could have sent out his newly evolved Pignite or his Scraggy instead, as they seem to be much more fighting oriented.

I enjoyed Dento's fangirling and the training scene with Satoshi and Waruvile, but the plot with the poacher was really boring. I expected Ulgamoth to fight back a bit more. It would have been more exciting if Ulgamoth had been referenced or seen before it's capture, it like...came out of nowhere.

Pretty solid episode to me. Sure the Hunter was just there for the sake of having a battle towards the end, but at least the hunter came off legitimately threatening. Brycen was definitely set up as a strong opponent for Ash in this ep. They did probably spend too much time training with Brycen for it to become a real fleshed out plot.