YMMV / Pokemon: Shadow of Time

• Base-Breaking Character: Kyoji. While some readers find him interesting as a member of the archetype of characters who are Brock or are essentially taking up Brock's place as Ash's main male friend in a generation unique to the fanfic, others consider he gets too much Character Shilling and doesn't have enough to himself to stand up on his own.
• Broken Base:
  • Either the Sabrina fight in Chapter 15 was an awesome high point for the series, or a massively confusing point of poor planning and rushed ideas. Notably the chapter is the first time Reset's main writer outright criticized the fic in a review.
  • Similarly to Reset the fic's tendency to skip around and have multiple scenes and P.O.V's per chapter is divisive. Some readers like it for being able to cover several different storylines at once (with Ash, Ash's various groups of Pokemon, Serena, etc) while other readers find it very disconcerting and hard to follow and the smaller chapters of Shadow of Time compared to Reset makes this swapping more disconcerting due to having less time to devote to all of the scenes each chapter.
  • The style of humor in the fic is either really funny, or it is too violent and meanspirited to be funny (an example of where the line is crossed by some is one where Jigglypuff is beaten up and attacked by various Ash mons).
• Fight Scene Failure: There are many things the fic does that Reset and Ashes also do skillfully as well. Some of them Shadow of Time does better per its fans. Fight scenes to other readers are not one of them. The fights in general to these fans are a lot shorter and less descriptive than the fight scenes in either fic, making them come off as a lot less satisfying.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: A Riolu joins Ash's team, with the relevant chapter being written during the Sun & Moon series some time before Ash would acquire a Riolu in canon during the next season.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The destruction of reality in the prologue causes all of Ash's classmates and their Pokémon to start basically sprouting blood, ranging from Mallow vomiting it to Snowy bleeding from every pore on its body.
  • In Rising Tide, even knowing that Groudon is on their side, the idea of that large creature running is terrifying to all those watching Groudon fight with the Dynamaxed Hydregion.
• Squick: Invoked from Giovanni when he privately expresses a wish for brain bleach when he realizes that Ash thinks he is Ash's father, Giovanni clarifying that he's actually Ash's maternal uncle.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Several readers have expressed negative feelings towards the author's portrayal of Serena, due to deviating too much from her anime portrayal. The fact that she suffers from having multiple Split Personalities doesn't help.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: While the work is known to have permission from Reset's writer to do as it does, the level of similarities in the fic is enough to cause some to balk at the fic's level of similarity with Reset (among them Fox, one of the other writers of Reset and by chapter 27, the head writer of Reset as well who pointed out just how many things are copied over right from Reset, including specific original characters and plot elements from said story).
• Wangst: Ash's reasons for not wanting romantic relationships are understandable. His reactions to the idea of them or anything approaching them, like engagements or seeing Misty in a bikini, go beyond stress and into something approaching a tantrum in the eyes of some readers. This warranted a comparison to Anakin Skywalker in the films as played by Tommy Wiseau by Reset's head writer. The fact that Ash in turn doesn't even consider the idea that the girls who like him are free to make their decision and act on it, or that he might in turn be able to do better than his father had, makes the inability to take the resulting angst seriously, especially when the reaction goes into borderline self-harm on Ash's part.