I mean
I didn't watch that much of the TV series as a kid because to me some kid going around beating gym leader after gym leader got pretty boring after a while so I watched like five episodes and that was all I could really take
meanwhile, you have the movies which are better animated (because they're supposed to because they're movies) and they generally tend to have higher stakes because they're dealing with the god-tier Pokemon and so if Ash and crew fail sometimes the world ends
they get more mediocre as they go along but the earlier ones are dramatic as forget for a kids cartoon
I haven't even played the games and don't plan to because that's not my kind of game
IDK /discuss