Puple Makai Knight is Rafael Banderas aka Gaia the Stronghold Knight (Funimation subs refer to it as the Gaia, Knight of Defense).

He was friends with the previous Garo (also known as Valiante's Knight of Light).

Rafael reveals that the previous Garo is the grandfather of León LuÃ*s AND Alfonso San Valiante. León's mother and Alfonso's mother are sisters. As the eldest sister León's mother was responsible for producing an heir that would inherit the title of Garo. As youngest sister Alfonso's mother was adopted by aristocrats so she would grow up away from all the violence.

Rafael promised the previous Garo to watch over Alfonso.

Is all that in episode 5? If so, that answers a lot of my questions up front.

Episode 5 is all about Purple knight and Alfonso. Garo & Zoro are the side story.

It also reveals that once a month Garo is never seen because he is giving his life to Zaruba. It also reveals that the previous Garo's armor is identical to the live action default Garo.

Cool. This actually sounds interesting. I'll have to catch that when it goes up on Hulu.

Okay, so I kinda skipped talking about episode 5, but 6 is worth some discussion. This was the first episode of this show that I would call legitimately excellent. The Horror plot was well done and both the blacksmith and his apprentice were developed nicely; I actually really felt bad for the blacksmith. I think this episode's plot can easily stand up there with some of the better episodic stories of the live action shows. The ending provided a really good hook for the ongoing plot, too; I actually want to see where this is going with these Black Knights.

I'm glad I stuck it out with this show, it has definitely won me over completely this week.

I've fallen a bit behind on this show, but here are my thoughts up through episode 9.

Episode 7 was annoying.

Episode 8 was dumb. Really dumb.

Episode 9, however, was pretty damn amazing. Our two underdeveloped protagonists meet up and take on one of the cooler looking Horrors ever. It's not on par with some of the better final enemies of the series like Ganon, but a Horror who's a giant stone sepulchre slithering along on the upside down corpses of its victims and armed with two giant grim reapers is just damn awesome. The fight against it was also suitably cool and picked in some good pathos with the transition of the Gaia armor to Alfonso. Easily the best episode of the series to date and it's really restored my faith after the hot mess that was German running around naked for 20 minutes (seriously, fuck episode 8).

I saw the first episode at my local anime & manga club for new anime day (Anime that came out in the last 7-9 months) and it was pretty good. Solid animation and it was pretty enjoyable. Most people in the club thought it was cool while one person was like "Meh. Berserk did better".

We did show the first Garo show for live action day last for my anime & manga club and a lot of people like it. I think a Garo anime was a good idea since it made more people check out the live action show. I hope the anime gets dubbed soon and is put on Toonami. With good marketing and the Garo anime is put on a good time slot then I think Garo can be the next Attack on Titan in the US.

The anime is decent and all, but yeah. I don't think it'll ever be anywhere near that popular.

Couldn't have said it any better. :lol

Who knows, if they market it well enough it can be. American anime fans always seem to enjoy darker action shows. Anything is possible.