Usually I blame writers lately. This time however, the writing was fine. I see what this episode was trying to do, and it had me at the edge of my seat. Perhaps a bit fast-paced, but I see what the writers were trying to do. This really could have been an amazing episode. But god, the delivery.
Okay. Whoever is in charge of the suspense of disbelief: for the love of god, try a little harder here. You already have a series in which this is very important, and this episode in particular depended on it with all of the gore. You could have really helped that with some actual good animation, but what stood out for me the most is how characters kept teleporting all over the place in this episode. Characters take huge leaps from one place to the other without any build-up whatsoever, leading to a lot of Deus ex Machina. I can understand timeskips and all, but there is a limit. Not to mention that showing characters actually travelling from A to B adds a lot to immersion. You need to worry about that, as much as you’d like to focus on your characters!
I read somewhere once that Manglobe is the kind of studio that doesn’t have many in-house people: for all of their projects they look around the industry for the right people. They’re basically outsourcing a lot, or at least they were around the time of Ergo Proxy and Michiko to Hatchin, and back then they were really good at it. This episode though. It just screamed outsourcing problems. Otherwise it just would not have looked so rushed, especially for such an important episode in the plot. I mean, something really went wrong in the production schedule.
Anyway, about the plot: this was where the series went even more out of control, by showing elements that were even more obviously supernatural, yet at the same time they’re all human: King Torture is just a man who managed to get ahold of strange powers that allowed him to create all those monsters. He too basically is just another person obsessed with superheroes and fiction, but he spiraled into the other side of the spectrum.
For the rest of the cast, I really liked how they used the build-up: people started to realize how they underestimated what it really means to be a superhero. That it’s not just about kicking ass and looking good. They started to look beyond the glory.
But damn, you’d better make up for this episode with the second half. There’s still plenty of potential left and all, but this execution isn’t the kind that a story like this deserves!
However, someone singing really badly? Hell yeah! Finally. I mean, who is expected to sing well after such a trauma?
Rating: 4.5/8 (Good)
I don’t think it was intentional but I laughed my ass of the entire episode. It was so bad and campy, it was good almost like Evil Dead 2. The villian grunting while he’s giving a speech while sawing his arm off, getting impaled on an action figure – and the cast having a casual coversation while the corpse twitches, gotou knocking over a giant missile with a pink hummer. That’s comedy gold.
They are definitely copying those 90’s terri-bad hero animes, the only question being if they are doing an homage or tongue-in-cheek. Leaning toward homage because this actually seems to take itself seriously.
I’ve been enjoying this series after the twist mostly because how closely is to a Tokusatsu series, with the good parts and the parts. But yeah, the bad storytelling is a little annoying at times (a problem since episode 1 in my opinion). Anyway, I’m excited to see what’s next: apparently a Super Sentai team is supposed to appear.
I don’t know what it was about this episode but it just felt wrong. It did not feel like I was watching a continuation of the previous episode, or there was mean’t to be an episode in between that we missed.
I still think this whole thing is a PR event. Perhaps masayoshi and goto do not know they are in a tv Sentai series. It just seems to me like more than meets the eye with the monsters and building up to something so much more.