This Pokemon Anime Scene Perfectly Captures the Futility of Trying to Catch Legendary Pokemon

A recent scene from the Pokemon anime perfectly captures a feeling every Pokemon player has felt [...]

By Christian Hoffer

A recent scene from the Pokemon anime perfectly captures a feeling every Pokemon player has felt before.

In the most recent episode of Pokemon the Series: Sun and Moon, Ash captured the Ultra Beast Poipole. While Poipole looks pretty cute and unassuming, it's actually a powerful Pokemon that hails from an alternate plane of reality known as Ultra Space. Because Poipole and other Ultra Beasts don't come from "our" universe, they're very hard to catch in normal Poke Balls. So, new Poke Balls called Beast Balls were created just to capture Ultra Beasts.

Of course, Beast Balls are only useful if it hits an Ultra Beasts. That's a lesson that Ash learned the hard way. You can see Ash's many, many futile attempts to catch Poipole in the clip below. Poipole thinks it and Ash are playing a game and gleefully dodges out of the way as Ash tosses what seems like 100 PokeBalls at the rare Pokemon.

It's not often that Ash struggles with catching catching Pokemon. While several Pokemon swatted away PokeBalls during the early Pokemon episodes, most Pokemon join up with Ash willingly after befriending him. That's what eventually happened with Poipole too, as it realized that Ash wanted it to go in a Poke Ball and jumped inside Ash's last Beast Ball after Ash demonstrated what a Poke Ball was supposed to do.

The scene might cause some disturbing flashbacks for some Pokemon players, especially those who played through early games like Pokemon Red and Blue. Legendary Pokemon used to be notoriously difficult to catch, even when they were saddled with some sort of status condition and had only a handful of hit points left. What Pokemon fan hasn't tossed their hands up in frustration after tossing 50 or more Ultra Balls at an Articuno because they didn't want to waste their Master Ball so early in the game? Luckily, catching Legendary Pokemon has gotten a lot easier in later Pokemon games, although there's occasionally a challenge or two waiting for players in newer games.

New episodes of Pokemon the Series: Sun and Moon air on Thursdays in Japan. Dubbed episodes air on Disney XD.

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