I don't think levels work in the same way in the anime. There's probably other stuff at work here. OR
Ash is actually aging a lot between seasons, and inbetween, Pikachu died, and was replaced, but due to psychological troubles, Ash convinces himself it's been the same Pikachu the whole time.
No one tells Ash because they fear he might have a meltdown, the ramifications of which could be severe.

Or that first thing I said.

Regarding this topic... Why do Jesse and James want Pikachu so badly if it is just an average pikachu? Why not catch legendary or rare Pokémon?

>>136
They're pretty dumb and Giovanni told them he wanted it IIRC.

Pikachu levels change depending on the enemy... if its going to fight against an Onix... he is level 100... but against a half-dead Bulbasaur is lvl 1.

Pikachu was introduced to dangerous amounts of electrical current, once directly from a storm and once fed directly in to his cheek pouches from Flint. I theorize that such amounts of raw, pure energy isn't balanced, and his power level sort of bounces up and down.

Everyone's using the rare candy glitch. Ash's level 100 Pikachu keeps getting it's ass kicked by level 250 sins against god.

actually im pretty sure it just boils down to the fact that Ash is STILL borderline retarded.
in the last movie i saw Ash said something along the lines of
"Whoa a thousand years! Thats like ten years times..." and began to count on his fingers and was saved by DAWN a fucking TEN YEAR OLD.
"...Times ten."

>>147
The phrase "sins against god" was recently used in another thread.
Is there some popular media thing saying that, now?

>>205
While I'm not going to argue Ash's retardedness, he IS 14. I think most of us can account for being dumb then. Also, I'm going to chock that one up to a translation error, because didn't they say that it was 10 times 10? That's only 100, and it definitely feels like there's something we didn't get.