Hello and welcome to another week of Megalo Box, with perhaps the best pre-finale hype episode ever. This week we have amazing music, fantastic language skills and lots of converging plot threads. Lets jump in!
First, numero uno, Megalo Box has the best soundtrack of this season. It’s simply fantastic. Pepe Iglesias’ theme was on for maybe 30 seconds and I already fell in love with it. It just oozes style and reminds me of Cowboy Bebop with the rhythm and what I believe is a trumpet. It also fits his character perfectly, with it providing a majority of Pepe’s characterisation this episode. It’s a shame he was taken out so quickly but we will get to that in just a moment. We also had Yuri’s theme this episode which was barely a piece of music, frankly. Hopefully Megalo Box has more in store for Yuri because so far its music has been on point. I mean, c’mon, just listen to this and this. Are they not the hypest tracks you’ve ever heard?
To go along with Megalo Box’s strong soundtrack showing, they also knocked it out of the park with the VA’s. I was not expecting actual quality English, to say nothing of the fluent Spanish of Iglesias. I don’t know enough to really judge, but according to what I have read there were only a few translation mistakes. Outside that, the pronunciation was phenomenal. They even went to far as to have actual Japanese subtitles. Its small things like this that, while Pepe had very little actual screen time, felt like an actual character. I can only hope Burroughs has a similarly stylish entrance/scenes. He’s going to need it if, as I suspect, his fight with Joe only lasts a single episode. I suspect single because we need time for Joe and Yuri to really build up and resolve. Megalo Box has a lot to do in only 3 episodes.
Now as for the Pepe vs Yuri fight… It was a mixed bag. This is the first we have really seen of Pepe, and we already know Yuri is strong, so it’s not a good “jobbing” fight. It starts off interesting, lots of shots of their feet moving and some rotations. Pepe has style in everything he does, like his back-sway. What bugs me about this fight however is the ending. Megalo Box has a problem with ending fights. Most of them end in a single shot, like this fight, and it’s just so… unsatisfying. I understand what Megalo Box was going for, building up Yuri as a fearsome opponent for Joe. But like I said, we already knew that. This should have been a showcase for Yuri, show him off animation wise. Start really building the hype for his fight with Joe. Instead we got a poorly done jobbing.
That’s not to say Yuri got nothing this week though, because his quiet conversation with Joe was interesting. They talk about motivations, why they fight the way they do, and Joe gushes abit about the fight. It was like two friends just chatting. It also opened up a really interesting question for me: Will Yuri fight with his Gear against Joe? Can he even take it off? If he fights without the Gear, it’s a betrayal of Yukiko and an embrace of Joe/his stray dog side. However if he fights with the Gear, Joe clearly has no chance of victory, and Yuri has a thing about the “Genuine Article”. I really can’t wait for their second fight and I hope, I hope, it doesn’t end in a one punch turnaround. I need this to be Joe Yabuki vs Jose Mendoza, not Joe vs Samejima round 2.
Outside the ring, there is another hurdle Joe has to get over before he can fight Yuri though. As I suspected, Fujimaki wants Joe and Nanbu to throw the Burroughs fight so they can make a whooole lot of money. Also as we suspected, Joe wants none of it. I am still curious as to how they are going to get out of it, if they will at all. It looks like Nanbu is preparing to fall on the sword for Joe and Sachio at this point. Taking Sachio to Yukiko for safety while basically getting drunk and accepting what he needs to do. There’s an interesting allegory with the frog and the scorpion that Nanbu seems to want to change. It works because I and others already suspect Joe won’t survive the finale. So it’s entirely possible Nanbu won’t either. Both are in legitimate danger, being an original anime.
Now for some small details I couldn’t mention elsewhere. I understand that his rings are “F” and “J”, but it almost likes like “FU”, which I thought amusing and I like these small details. Sachio also had a small story this week, getting follow up on his father situation and tying him to Shirato. The cool thing is the building blocks that went into it though, because we had already seen all of the details Nanbu mentioned to him. It something we could have feasibly figured out ourselves. We even got to see Sachio not really get over this past, but decide on his own revenge on Shirato. It was a nice touch, with Yukiko and the children. Outside Fujimaki and maybe Mikio, there really isn’t a “villain” for Megalo Box and yet it still works. Im gushing at this point, so suffice to say, I loved the details.
All in all, perhaps one of the best pre-finale hype episodes I have seen in a long time. Lots of converging plot threads, lots of buildup, and plenty of obstacles for our heroes. I loved it. Heck, the ending line alone, “So tell me… who should I be betting on tonight?” pulled it all together and put a nice bow on top of the episode. It’s a callback to the first episode where Nanbu ruined the guys first bet on Joe. It’s a question to Nanbu’s character, who he is after 10 episodes since we already know what old Nanbu would do. This one question acts as a lynchpin for the episode and a sort of cliffhanger at the same time. Megalo Box really outdid itself this week, managing to hype everyone up for what will hopefully be a phenomenal finale in the coming weeks.
See you then!
