My introduction to Pokemon Adventures was as a child when I read Diamond Pearl and Platinum. I loved it so I decided recently to read it from the beginning starting with Gen 1. I enjoyed RBG and Yellow a lot so I was very excited for a new arc especially with its 90chapter length as I hoped that it would have better fleshed out characters as my only real complaint about RBG was how short it was and how little time there was to connect with some of the characters. I was very excited to read this new arc and experience Johto. My biggest issue with this arc was the characters... again. Gold is charismatic but every interaction that he has with Silver or Crystal which there are not many of is abrasive or argumentative until the very end which I will get into when I talk about the ending. Silver is a noncharacter. He is kinda like Blue in RBG but the difference is that the arc is over twice as long and Silver has no characterization besides being edgy up until the end when they exposition dump a backstory for him and Green with only a few chapters left that does more to establish Green as a character than Silver. Crystal is probably the best character of the main three but the story doesnt really know what to do with her. She shows up almost a third of the way through the arc and then you dont see Gold or Silver again for the next 24 chapters. There is also this thing where Crystal is a strong independent female character which is awesome but then upon her first failure to capture a pokemon she is now unable to do anything by herself and needs to be yelled at by her mother in order to get back on track. As I said the story seems confused about Crystals role as she starts out this strong femal character then becomes a crying mess then goes into a training montage then gets saved repeatedly by Gold and then has essentially no agency in the final battle the handling of female characters in this arc is weird as a whole since Misty is also present and is chosen by Suicune only to get beaten up by the villain fail to capture him and then gets ditched by Suicune. The only wellhandled female character is Green but she is literally one of the protagonists of a previous arc so that completely undercuts the new cast of characters. The main villain Pryce is another of my big issues with this arc. When the Masked Man is introduced he is a decently imposing villain. He shows up in Ilex Forest then again at the Lake of Rage then he fights Surge then he just...goes away until the final battle. He captures Lugia sure but you dont see him do it and you dont find out that he did it until later. He has no presence in most of the arc yet at the end when its revealed that it is Pryce a character who has been in only a couple scenes we are supposed to be blown away. There is also the issue of his powers. Pryce creates ice sculptures that he explains his pokemon can move and puppeteer yet at the end of the arc he creates ice clones of himself and controls them freely without the use of any of his pokemon which means that Pryce must be able to create ice. I know that Sabrina is a psychic but icebased powers do not seem to have any precedent in the story. His motivation is also kinda lame and we only find out about it like a chapter before he is defeated. Two of his Laprass which he loved dearly so much so that he gave them almost identical names died in an accident and it made the third Lapras sad so he decided to go back in time using the power of Celebi to bring them back. Its okay but again we dont know the masked man we dont know Pryce and a chapter after we learn about this the arc will be over so there is little reason for us to even really care about this backstory of his. The final battle was absurd. This is a pokemon story about Gold Silver and Crystal so logically the final battle should revolve around Gold Silver Crystal and their pokemon. It doesnt at all. Gold fights Pryce who doesnt use his pokemon but instead ice puppets and to stop Pryces henchmen from getting to Celebi it isnt any of the protagonists of this arc that do it but instead Red Blue and Green riding the legendary birds of Kanto. Then when Pryce shows up and enters the time dimension Gold Silver and Crystal are all together for basically the first time and then decide to work together and go into the portal to stop Pryce. They go in there are a bunch of flashbacks of the characters arguing because they never had actual positive interactions with each other before they reminisce fondly then Silver and Crystal turn around and Gold defeats Pryce by destroying the pokeball that holds Celebi and then escapes the time portal offscreen. Pryce hears a song as these Laprass that we just met are reunited Gold slaps Greens ass on accident and the arc ends. I still want to keep reading this manga I still had some fun at points with this arc but this was just a real bummer in a lot of ways. The story was nonsensical in ways that Im not even going to get into right now the new characters were a mess and had no agency in their own story and the main villain and final battle were just bizarre.