Episode Stats:

Japanese Episode 004:  "The Treasure that Washed Ashore"
English Episode 2604:  "The Treasure After the Storm!"
Dr. Friede's Pokémon Seminar:  Hogator
Japanese Air Date:  April 28th, 2023
American Air Date:  March 7th, 2024
Important Characters:  Hamber (???), Gibeon (Gibeon),
Important Places: 

Air leaks are discovered in the envelope of the Brave Asagi and so the Rising Volteccers bring the ship down to a nearby island for repairs. As the crew works to assess the damage the ship's Hogator wanders onto its deck and ends up falling off down toward the island below! On the island, a young boy named Roy is admiring a flag he found washed ashore when he hears the sound of a Pokémon singing. He tracks the voice down to a nearby cliff where the Rising Volteccers' Hogator is practicing its song! Roy and Hogator quickly become friends after the former praises the latter's musical abilities. Liko, meanwhile, has noticed Hogator's gone missing so she starts looking around the island for the missing Fire-Type. Her search keeps getting sidetracked when a bunch of the island's Bug-Type Pokémon start to chase her around the island, eventually putting her in contact with Roy and Hogator. During a break in the running, Roy shows off an ancient Monster Ball his grandpa gave him. The two children eventually figure out the Pokémon are upset because earlier Hogator had eaten the food they had put aside for themselves and so, after a quick Pokémon battle, the two help restock the Bug-Type’s food supply. Now that Hogator's been found and the island's Pokémon are satisfied again Liko bids Roy farewell and returns to the ship. Elsewhere, Amegeo and his team make a report to Hamber, a fellow member of the Explorers, about the pendant…

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Thoughts
We saw Roy for a bit at the end of the previous episode but "The Treasure that Washed Ashore" is, for all intents and purposes, his actual introduction to the series. And it's...fine, I guess? Roy's a pleasant enough kid but I don't feel like I really know that much about him when all's said and done. "He's cheerful and likes Pokémon" isn't really breaking a lot of ground here, you know? We learned a lot more about Liko in her first episode than we did about Roy in his first episode, but to be fair I think a lot of that also has to do with how Roy doesn't get inner monologues the way his co-star does. Roy has to just talk to a little alligator instead, and while it's kind of cute, I guess, it's also not all that interesting.

This episode also starts to make it painfully obvious that the show isn't going to allow Liko and Roy to be the show's true main characters because every time they're in trouble Friede will swoop in to save the day. It's a problem that will hound the series for a while. This episode, for example, could have easily ended with Liko and Roy calming down the forest Pokémon all on their own and yet it didn't because...I dunno, they wanted to make Liko and Roy look utterly helpless against a group of Caterpie? Because they wanted to show Friede being a hero, again? The lack of any sort of tension in this series is probably its biggest flaw right now and it's only going to get worse as time goes on.

Up until this episode I'd say the English dub's biggest problems are a) its replacement music score (this is the fourth episode in a row to keep zero Japanese music) and b) its unbelievably slow release schedule in the U.S., but with this episode we can now add c) all things Fuecoco to the list. I'll get into the Fuecoco of it all a bit later in this comparison but let's just say I am not a fan. Thankfully, just about every other aspect of this dub is handled pretty well. The script continues to be amazingly accurate and the voice acting, except Fuecoco, is actually really top notch as well. If the English dub could fix its music and Fuecoco problems then it would honestly be something I wouldn't mind recommending, something I haven't been able to say about the English dub of Pokémon since...well, since ever, really.

Dialogue Edit
The script for this episode is like the script for Episode 2 in that it's an extremely faithful translation of the Japanese original. It's honestly a really, really good script. About the only dialogue related thing I can even think to bring up here is that there's this one shot in the first half of the episode where two Strike walk by. The two Pokémon move their mouths but no sound comes out and so TPCi decides to dub them saying "Scyther" for the English dub. Other than that extremely nitpicky thing there's nothing to report script-wise for the first half of the episode.


Side Note
There may not be much to talk about when it comes to spoken dialogue in this episode, but Fuecoco's and Roy's singing...? It's...well, it's kind of a dumpster fire.


For starters, Fuecoco is easily the Pokémon with the worst voice in this series, no contest. Hogator's cute little hoge hoge gets replaced with...oh I dunno, the sound of someone gargling mouthwash? Of someone choking on a kazoo? Of a turkey drowning? It's honestly such a terrible voice and I can't believe dub viewers are going to have to put up with this for basically every single episode moving forward.

And then if that wasn't bad enough, the little alligator starts to sing. Now I don't know why the English dub decided to change up the melody of Hogator's little cheerleading song but they did, and in doing so they created a situation where Fuecoco is "singing" a new melody that no longer matches the animation it's paired to.

And then Roy joins in on the "fun," except Roy isn't really on tune or on melody and so all the singing scenes devolve into this awful cacophony of noise. Maybe that's what TPCi was going for, but it's not what the Japanese original was trying to do. There are all these lines in the episode about Fuecoco being a great singer, and about Roy liking Fuecoco's song, and it honestly feels like the dub is trying to gaslight us into thinking the two of them are great when the reality is anything but.

Unfortunately Hogator's singing is a pretty major part of its character so this is something dub fans are going to have to put up with a lot moving forward.

Eyecatch
This week's eyecatch gives us Liko in her regular clothes:


Click on each image to view a larger version.

Dialogue Edit
Roy tells Liko about his goal:

Japanese (original)	Japanese (translated)	English Dub
ロイ　「僕　トレーナーに憧れてるんだ。ただのトレーナーじゃなくて小さい頃じ いちゃんに聞かせてもらった古の冒険者みたいなトレーナーに」	Roy:  "I really look up to Trainers. But I don't want to be just any Trainer. I wanna be an ancient adventurer like the one my grandpa told me about when I was little."	Roy:  "All I really want is to be a Trainer someday. But not just any old Trainer, I wanna be the special kind my gramps told me about like the Trainers of old who use these. That'd be the best."
リコ　「古の冒険者…どんな人なの？」	Liko:  "Ancient adventurer...what kind of person was he?"	Liko:  "Be like the Trainers of old...and what did they do?"
ロイ　 「伝説のポケモンたちに挑戦し世界を巡って旅を続けいつか誰も知らない場所でポケモンたちとお宝を目指す。そんな冒険者…かな」	Roy:  "He challenged legendary Pokémon and traveled all over the world and would sometimes set his sights on treasures and Pokémon in places no one's ever been before. At least, I think that's what he was like."	Roy:  "Well they challenge legendary Pokémon and journey on adventures all around the world. They get to go to places nobody's even heard of before, and they hunt for new Pokémon and treasures. Yeah! That kind of Trainer, I think."

One of the quirks about the Japanese language is that it doesn't really have a separate singular and plural form. The word boukensha (冒険者), for example, can mean either "adventurer" or "adventurers," and it's up to the listener to figure out which meaning is the intended one. Same with toreenaa (トレーナー) or hito (人); those words can mean with Trainer or Trainers, person or people, respectively. As someone who does Japanese translation work every single day, both for my actual job as well as for the work I do for this website, I know first hand that sometimes the guess you make doesn't actually end up being correct. And in a vacuum I can see someone easily making the same mistake TPCi makes here.

Bu we fans now know, with the benefit of hindsight, that what Roy is specifically referring to here is a single adventurer named Lucius. TPCi should have known this as well since this fact is revealed just two episodes from now but I guess nobody saw the connection to this scene and therefore just let it be. It's a shame because TPCi's dialogue makes it seem like Roy just wants to be like a Trainer instead of wanting to be like a very particular Trainer he looks up to, and that's a pretty big distinction.

Video Edit
Is it worth it for me to keep mentioning how the "To Be Continued" text is removed from the dub? This seems like it's going to be a series-wide edit, right?


Click on each image to view a larger version.

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This page was last updated on March 8th, 2024