Personally I haven't been commited to watching the Pokemon anime ever since I was a kid and stopped watching Master Quest sometime shortly around the time Ash won the Rising badge b/c I felt that the show was taking dragging on for way to long esp.since I had the Pokemon Silver game and the game is so formulaic that you already have a fairly good idea of what is going to happen.The only reason I became aware with the "Diamond and Pearl" era and beyond was b/c of my hardly decade old cousin asking me for help with playing the games (after all these years despite the updates and new features the game mechanics are largely the same ) and finding websites to watch new Pokemon episodes online,sometimes watching them with her.I 've got to say that I dont really pay much attention to how the battles go and/or it's not like I'm anymore scrutinizing then I was when I was saw the show when I was little.I've got to ask however has Ash's battling tactics and methods changed in any way or are the battling methods always used in Pokemon like the ones used in Yu-gi-Oh where mistakes and bad choices are purposely done so as to display the new moves or abilities of the newly encountered monster?.I think that b/c, I highly doubt that the show abides by the same rules as the games esp.when it comes to levels which I only remember being mentioned once a looonnngg time ago (9th episode:"school of hard knocks") when a kid talked about the level's of Pidgey's evolution.

Side notes:I may not watch the show commitedly like when I was a kid but when the main show ends and whether or not it'll lead to some spin off like "Pokemon chronicles" I'll be there waiting to watch that last episode to have the symbolic and sentimental joy of seeing how the show executes it's closure.Also since really old Pokemon episodes were brought up I'd like to say the episodes where Ash tries to find a battle with the gym leader Sabrina and the group encounters that creepy talking doll,their escape after the battle goes bad,Ash and Misty being turned into dolls with a close up of the doll laughing are to this day one of the most intriguingly,honestly scary episodes of Pokemon and has stuck with me all these years as a result.Does anyone know if they've ever done anything like that ever again?.