Perhaps contrary to the popular opinion, I enjoyed this more than the first series. Journey to the Legend Cup is a little more like a sports/tournament anime than Mystery of the Disk Stone, and as such it able to draw a lot more from its source material games where training and raising your monster to fight in tournaments to be the best there ever was is one of the main goals. The premise revolves around saving the soul of Holly's father, the key to doing that being a piece of the Legend Cup's Trophy. To participate in the Legend Cup you need to have won severalother regional tourneys. Genki gets to flex his Monster Rancher skills to turn Mocchi into a lean, mean, Mocchi-ho machine. It's like the games mixed with some character drama from the first series! Excellent.

The show had a great and pretty emotional start which gives Holly, Mocchi and Genki a little more room to think than anything in the first series. After that the show largely sets into its rhythm of training, participating in a tournament, journeying to the next location where a few things happening along the way. Rinse repeat. It's pretty neat and well done; they wrapped it up right as they were starting to overdue the formula.

There is an antagonistic force in the form of remnant Warumon who weren't purified from the end of the last series. I'd say they weren't really needed in a story like this - they could have gotten by with just the challenge posed by the championship monsters, but the implementation is pretty good. It's basically an avanue to introduce monster of the week stuff (which is actually a welcomed element in a creature-feature show like this). The comedic elements in Legend Cup were also more sophisticated than previous series, and the antagonists actually bring a fair amount of that to the table.

My main letdowns were that I had hoped to see more of Venus/Pixie (she only shows up for one episode, probably due to cost...), and I think the final battle at the end could have had a few familiar faces show up to help (like Venus...) ... But these aren't massively big deals in the grand scheme of what I feel the show accomplished.

So personally overall, I found a lot to love. Several story points from the first show are resolved, older characters return for another go to show how they've changed since Mu's defeat, and its got a really satisfying ending which put a smile on my face and fond memories of the whole experience in my heart.