[Purimpopoie]

Originally Posted by Fat Manveru123

Anime would be better if Ash stopped leaving his best pokemon with Oak and starting every new season with just Pikachu -_-

Then Ash would never catch any new Pokemon. And it's hard to advertise for the new games if he's carting around his old Kanto team.

While there have been some legitimate bad and pointless decisions in the anime, most of the things that seem bad (replacing Misty/May/Dawn every series, Ash leaving Pokémon behind) are really just marketing decisions to advertise the games. Because the anime is just a commercial for the games, and anything that helps them sell more games is more important than an interesting story to the people making it.

That's not to say that they don't manage to make entertaining episodes and interesting storylines and characters. There's an episode of Black and White where Meowth and Oshawott fall in love with a Purrloin that is actually really funny with how Cilan reacts to all of them and the reveal at the end. But making Ash/Pikachu weak at the beginning of every series so they can reteach the basics (Advance and DP are exempt from this because we had May and Dawn to be the rookie) is so they can get children who are watching the series for the first time to relate to the main character.

I feel like I've been rambling. The TL:DR version is this: The anime exists only to sell games and cards and all decisions of what goes in it are motivated to sell more games and cards.

EDIT:

Originally Posted by Fat DTC

I thought most of the Gym Battles in the Gen 1 anime series were a joke.

My favorite example of this is the "Air Lense" bullshit that Blaine pulled to hax Ash out of a legitimate win he was about to have. "The superheated air around Magmar doesn't conduct electricity! Your Pikachu can't hit it with Electric attacks!" Imagine if Magmar was immune to Electric attacks in the games?