Suede's Pokémon Journey is a series made by Suede, in which he reviews every episode of Pokémon: The Series. Episodes come out weekly, this also included looks at each part of Pokémon Origins.
Each episode has a consistent format: a synopsis where Suede recaps the episode, a thoughts segment where he gives his opinion on the episode as a whole and assigns a score, and a trivia segment where he sights various details about the episode, or the Pokémon given center stage (normally drawn from Bulbapedia and/or Dogasu's Backpack). He also sticks to three topics he doesn't comment on, which consist of the following: ten-year old children being allowed to go out on personal quests; Ash never seeming to age; discrepancies between mechanics in the games, vs the show. note
Originally he had a letter-grade scoring system, but due to Values Dissonance (New Zealand grades holding different weight and connotations than American ones) he decided to change it to a system themed around types of Poké Ball. In descending order:
- Master Ball: Reserved for what he considers the best episodes, with little to no flaws.
- Ultra Ball: Used for episodes that while not perfect, are otherwise still better than average.
- Great Ball: Used for episodes that are flawed, but have enough positive features to be considered good.
- Poké Ball: Used for episodes he holds as more heavily flawed, but not completely without its strengths.
- Rock: Used for episodes that he can't find any redeeming qualities in.
- Dark Ball: Used for episodes that he views as presenting or promoting an actively harmful moral, to the point it erases any potential good qualities.note
On February 2, 2022, Suede was forced to remove all Pokémon videos from his YouTube and Patreon accounts after receiving a legal complaint from ShoPro, the producers of the Pokémon anime. He has since rebooted the series as Suede's Papermon Journey
, using paper cutouts. Thankfully, he was later able to make the original videos available again for viewing (albeit in a different format) on his Patreon page here, and then began to pick up where he left off (the videos are marked as unpaid posts, meaning they're publicly available without requiring payment).
Suede's Pokémon Journey provides examples of:
- The Abridged Series: This series verges as close as it can to this while still being a review series. In addition to snarky comments regarding the more odder parts of the anime, he'll insert his own voice-over lines for the characters to highlight the absurdity of the situation.
- Adaptation Personality Change: In the main series, Oak is very much along with the rest of the group when it comes to dunking on Ash while praising Gary. In the review series, Oak ends up becoming one of the very few people to actively dunk on him instead.
- Ambiguously Human: Played for laughs with the Nurse Joys; Suede will occasionally make jokes about them all being clones of some sort—in one, where forced perspective momentarily makes one look smaller than Professor Elm, Suede questions if she didn't get enough growth hormones in her test tube, while in the movie retrospective, he has an Officer Jenny momentarily let it slip that it takes a while for Nurse Joys to complete their "incubation" so getting replacements is not easy. The Blissey episode would have him joke that a bizarre scene of Chansey holding candles in a graduations ceremony was a ritual to summon Nurse Joy's to the mortal plane.
- April Fools' Day:
- In 2017, as Pokémon Journey approached episode 34, “The Kangaskhan Kid”, Suede presented a review of Digimon Adventure’s 34th episode “The Eighth Child Revealed”, replacing character and object names with Pokémon’s nearest equivalent.
- In 2020, he reviewed an episode of Dinosaur King in the same fashion, but this time, human character name replacements are according to the voice actors the characters share.
- In 2021, he reviewed all the episodes of Pokémon: Twilight Wings after eating a chili pepper and only allowing himself to drink dairy after he'd finished.
- Author Appeal: Suede is very fond of Worldbuilding Episodes, as well as episodes where Team Rocket team up with the twerps, and episodes where even the One-Off Characters go through an actual arc.
- Compressed Adaptation: Starting with Johto, he's started to review two episodes in a single video since the anime starts to get infamous for filler around that point and he doesn't want the series to take however many decades as the anime itself took while still ongoing.
- Central Theme: As Suede would point out several times, the anime's theme is and always will be "it's the journey that counts, not the destination". It's the main reason he doesn't bother too much with the infamous usual problems most people have with the anime.
- Couch Gag: Every episode begins with a list of the three topics that Suede doesn't want to discuss, expressed through an elaborate Shout-Out.
- Death by Adaptation: The two other Pallet Town Trainers who, in canon, just gave up or otherwise went a different path (little is said beyond the fact they didn't return to Pallet Town), are in this telling dead by being squashed by spaceship debris from the Clefairy episode just prior.
- Delayed Reaction: For his 200th episode
Milestone Celebration, Suede's commentary is noticeably not interrupted when a wild CellSpex appears. Even after noticing her, he doesn't react much at all beyond acknowledgement and the Synopsis continues as usual. Only at the end of the Thoughts section does he finally react to her surprise appearance. - Dude, Not Funny!: In-Universe, Suede wasn't a fan of "Beauty and the Beach", finding the episode horrid due to the sexualization of Misty, especially being leered at by a Dirty Old Man. While he understands the episode is just meant as light-hearted slapstick, it still made him feel uncomfortable and he didn't find James' boob joke, Jessie's body shaming and the whole beauty pageant any better. It's one of the few episodes that got a Dark Ball rating, the lowest on his scale.
- Early-Installment Weirdness:
- Since the episode with the gag proper doesn't get reviewed until the tail end of Kanto, most of his early videos miss what would soon be one of his most iconic running gags involving the Rocket Trio.note
- The first few episodes didn't have a synopsis section. Suede later explained that he had intended for the viewers to watch the actual episode prior to watching the review, but realized he hadn't been very clear in that regard.
- The first several episodes also didn't have Suede inserting his own dialogue into the character's mouths and lacked a lot of jokes and gags later episodes would have, instead being a much more straight forward review series.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Played with in "All Fired Up"—Giovanni seems genuinely horrified at Jessie, James and Meowth burning Ash to death in the hypothetical scenario where their heist succeeded, but given how he specifically mentions that they did this all in front of thousands of witnesses while wearing the Team Rocket logo prominently on their chests, Pragmatic Villainy was likely also in play.
- Fridge Logic: In-Universe during his review of Holiday Hi-Jynx he discussed that the presence of Santa Claus meant that there was a presence of the holiday of Christmas, meaning that Christianity must exist in the Pokémon world, in addition he questions if Arceus is worshiped, as he created all the universe. He later realizes he's over thinking it.
- Informed Wrongness: Invoked and lampshaded frequently whenever a character is treated in the wrong when they should by all accounts be in the rights. Instances of this are usually the thing that makes Suede the most irritated he can get at the anime. The worst examplesnote will usually get a Dark Ball from him.
- Kill All Humans: He tends to give Pikachu subtitles for his Pokémon Speak that make him sound morbid.
- Logic Bomb: In August 2018, Suede released a video of his "Top 14 Screw-ups" of Suede's Pokémon Journey so far. It was supposed to be the Top 15 until he realised one of them wasn't really a mistake: "It's 14 instead of 15... because I screwed up. How on-message is that?" He also managed to screw-up with one of those that did make it into the listcontext, which was pointed out and acknowledged by Suede in the comments.
- MST3K Mantra: In-Universe in his review of "Holiday Hi-Jynx", Suede recites it enough that it almost becomes a Madness Mantra.
- Rare Candy: As a joke for "Round One - Begin" in reference to how strong Ash's Krabby was, even evolving after a single victory, Suede hinted that it was because it had devoured Professor Oak's entire candy jar when he wasn't looking.
- Remake:
- He re-reviews “Holiday Hi-Jynx” for uniformity’s sake with the other Journey episodes, openly acknowledging the reusing of jokes from the original Animenia review.
- His Animenia reviews of the first four Pokémon movies will also be remade in the Pokémon Journey style, even reteaming with Linkara for them. The Pokémon: The First Movie review was released in early 2020.
- Rhyming Episode: The synopsis of "Clefairy and the Moon Stone" is entirely in rhyme, since Seymour the scientist in that episode rhymes often. The review of the Pikachu short "Stantler's Little Helpers" is also done entirely in rhyme, in the style of "A Visit from St. Nicholas".
- Running Gag:
- Whenever a character or Suede himself drops the line "Not like this," Linkara's over-top "NOT LIKE THIIIS!" plays faintly in the background.
- Also whenever a character display reprehensible and/or illogical behavior (usually for blatantly transparent plot reasons), but still is supposed to be sympathetic to the audience, Suede has them shout out "I'M QUIRKY!"
- When an Obviously Evil character with an accent appears, they usually proclaim "[stereotypical expression related to their accent], I sure do love being evil!"
- Putting Gag Subs over scenes of Pokémon Speak, usually involving Pikachu wanting to rise up against humans in Giratina's name.
- After "The Battle of the Badge", any plan by Team Rocket to catch a new Pokémon will contain a scene parodying the one where Giovanni was inexplicably unimpressed by their capture of Togepi ("What exactly does this Pokémon do?") This often ends in him ordering them to be put through the "Eternal Pain Project". It's occasionally subverted when Team Rocket genuinely have a pretty good plan, which Giovanni praises them for.
- Every time Ash calls Professor Oak in the Orange Islands, Suede portrays Oak as increasingly upset that Ash still hasn't delivered the GS Ball.
- Mocking Ash for constantly making stupid and illogical moves in battle (particularly when it came to Charizard). It's as close as he gets to addressing Ash's unaging, unchanging nature.
- Togepi's tendency to randomly wander off, seemingly aware that they are doing so to be an easy plot device.
- "[Pokémon], try winning!" when a Pokémon wins a battle in a particularly poorly-written way, usually after being at a disadvantage throughout most of the match.
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Spiritual Successor: As the new format of his Pokémon movie reviews once he finishes treading the ground of the first four films. - This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: During the trivia for "A Sappy Ending" Suede points out that a character may have been named in the dub after a former LDS leader, and then excuses it by asking the viewer how often him being a former Mormon is ever useful.
- Trauma Button: As Johto shows, Whitney is for Suede, and her debut episode plays this gag hard.
- Whole-Plot Reference: His review of "The Pi-Kahuna" spoofs The Big Lebowski, due to Victor's resemblance to Sam Elliott, as he emulates Elliott's narration from that film.
- You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: His reaction to Giovanni casually brushing off Togepi in one of the few times Team Rocket managed to succeed in capturing one of the twerps Pokémon. Namely because, at that point, Togepi was an incredibly rare Pokémon not seen before that could have still been sold to a high collector regardless of its battle prowess.
