Pokemon Concierge has returned for another hurrah. Now this may not be my favorite Pokemon title to put it mildly but I’m always glad to have more Pokemon content. In a sense, it’s admirable that this does not have a negative score since just about every factor is working against it. Concierge has a very short runtime and not a lot of episodes but still does its best to capture the spirit of the franchise here. It’s all about coexistence between Pokemon and humans.

Following up on part 1, Haru has become a tiny bit more confident in herself at the Pokemon resort. She helps the others out in taking care of the Pokemon and making sure they all had a good time. Unfortunately, this also means she has more responsibilities such as taking care of the place when everyone else is out. Additionally, an old man shows up who wants them to take care of his Sealeo and this will be difficult for the resort. Can Haru really hold her own?

I guess we should get the big stuff out of the way first. The main problem with the show is the animation style. It doesn’t really look good. It’s a super old claymation/stop motion kind of approach that was already getting outpaced back in the 60s. Nowadays it really can’t beat any of the mainstream styles. Even simple things like the characters sweating doesn’t look as convincing as in the other titles. Since TV shows are a visual medium, this is already presenting a rather massive hurdle to overcome.

The soundtrack tends to be nonexistent but at one point they do play a classic battle theme. The battle on screen is of course not much of a fight and ends up resolving in a comedic manner, but I was at least glad the show was going for some action there. This is ultimately aimed at a pretty young audience so you can’t be expecting too much here. That’s why I’ll take every breadcrumb that I can.

As the main character, Haru does suffer from this a little bit as she has to keep on learning things that she should already know by this point. The first episode had her getting nervous and feeling a lot of self doubt again. After the first part, she should not have any doubts anymore. I would have liked her to have been more consistently confident the whole time. Maybe glancing around and directing the others on what to do at some points. Instead, even near the end she is thinking that she isn’t ready for this. Even going as far as to storm into the meeting room and start apologizing because she assumed an old guy was complaining about her.

Haru needs to value her own abilities far more than she does currently. Alas, it feels like she is always taking a step back when the going gets tough. Hopefully she will change this if we get a part 3. The cast of characters is still fairly small here and that’s probably for the best since there isn’t a lot of time for them all to appear. The owner, Ms. Watanabe for example just shows up for a few key scenes. I like how she called out the new guy for running away from his Pokemon and generally runs a tight ship. You need to be decisive like that when you’re in this position.

Alisa really doesn’t do much here but she had a bit more of a focus in part 1 so that makes sense. Tyler gets what I would call the main subplot here when his uncle Dan shows up. Dan is a tough guy who used to be real intimidating back in the day. He has mellowed out but still has a tendency to just do his own thing without really talking to anybody else. This does result in some pretty big mistakes here.

I definitely lost a lot of respect for the guy when he just flat out abandoned his Sealeo. He tried to immediately walk this back and explain how that wasn’t what was going on but Ms. Watanabe definitely had him to rights on that. It’s a hard situation to really walk back from. Dan does his best to help out after that and is okay I guess but there isn’t anything really compelling about the guy.

In a sense, that’s the problem with the cast in general. They’re all pleasant enough characters but none of them are super interesting. You’ll end up forgetting about them almost immediately after you have finished the adventure. That’s the real problem here. Well, one of them anyway. I do want to underscore that the show doesn’t really have any strong negatives. I could recommend it to anyone to watch.

There just isn’t much of a hook to watching it. It can be a little boring in a sense which is why it’s good that these are not full length episodes or that it didn’t launch with 13. Now, there’s a chance that the long run time could end up making things more interesting so that might be a gamble that would be worth taking. At the very least, you could give more screentime to her ex boyfriend who shows up but mainly just seems like a nice dude. We could have had a whole character arc for the guy and a lot of build up to his big appearance. If you ask me, that would have been a really interesting direction to go in.

Overall, Pokemon Concierge just adds 4 new episodes to this saga and each one is short so it’s more like 2 episodes or a little shorter than that. I fear that it won’t be able to make much progress into being really strong unless it ends up switching the animation style. It’s not impossible to succeed with this method of animation but it certainly isn’t easy. With Pokemon you’re always used to a lot of vibrant colors and really expressive designs. You don’t end up getting any of that with this title and you don’t have the fight scenes to compensate for that. So as it stands, I’m going to need them to announce a new online Pokemon series soon.

Overall 5/10