天下制覇

Let's all go down to the 24 hour bakery, "Hot and Crouton."

Impressions:

Not a particularly enthralling episode, but served its purpose without being obnoxious or fluffed up with a lot of needless arglbargl. I'm calling that a win in Japanese animation. A perhaps overly simple monster of the week to introduce the new character, contrast him with Sword, but… not a whole lot else. Which is almost fine…ish, because it also didn't talk my ear off pretending like it was filled up with awesome stuff, and did address one of the things that I said Garo generally needs to do (show that transforming isn't just an auto one-hit kill), but there was plenty of room for improvement. Perhaps the most awkward thing was the girl from episode one who popped up seemingly just to remind us that she still exists, and then completely vanished from the episode again. The magic amnesia rain is also a really poor band-aid over something that would probably be left simply unaddressed at all.

The main thing is that neither of the two characters it focused on this week were all that interesting. I can see Super Collar (I seriously cannot for the life of me remember if they actually ever used his name, so let's go with that) acting as a foil or even antagonist against Sword eventually, but he has the charisma of a pile of dirt, and the embittered sprinter needed to be actually corrupted. They skipped over the middle part of the super villain process and went right from "wronged by circumstances" to "MURDER EVERYTHING." And they didn't even show the murdering either, so it was extra ineffective. Have him start with going crazy for red meat, then raw, then get to the long pig buffet as he loses control and becomes desperate to hold onto his newfound thing. That's corruption. This was just flipping a switch between sad and maniacal. If all you want is a throwaway monster, then don't spare the time on the sob story. But if you want a "fall of man" deal, put in the effort.

Next Episode:

Femme fatale.