Yeah.

TOWSITD 8.

This was a surprisingly boring episode. In itself, the set up for this show is very interesting, but the mystery and horror aspects of this show usually fall flat, as they seem to rely on us ignoring that we've watched our heroes slay Horrors for two seasons and a whole bunch of movies before this.

Makai Knights are supposed to hunt Horrors in secret? I'm pretty sure no Knight in the series has followed this rule, last seasons GARO broke this rule quite spectacularly pretty much every episode.

Moving this to the correct thread!

I will admit I'm disappointed that the practical suits are gone, and that the Horrors are now in human form as much as the heroes. Although they never had much time in the sun, I really enjoyed the Horror suits and am saddened they've been replaced by a generic CGI mouth effect for every villain.

I must also admit I'm not a big fan of the protagonists. Although the characterisation was really weak in the second season, in the first season I enjoyed pretty much every character, here Ryuga and Takeru are really the only people who do it for me and even then Takeru's ludicrous overacting is painful.

Still, I don't think the writing here is any weaker than the other two seasons, GARO and Makai Senki were both chock full of garbled mythology and plot threads that went absolutely nowhere. The fact that TOWSITD seems to be trying to streamline the story in the right direction (as Makai Senki went in the wrong one) this is turning out to be the best written GARO yet, but that isn't saying much...

TOWSITD 9.

This was a weird episode, morally. It was basically one long message that claimed 'if you try to do the right thing, you will be brutally punished.'. Even the journalist, who initially angered me for betraying Ryuga, was really only trying to help and he died because of it.

Since a lot has been changed over the course of the seasons, I dunno whether to be impressed or not that Mr Big Bad was able to throw aside Ryuga's sword so easily. Is Soul Metal still impossible to lift to the untrained?

Either way, the action was really fun in this episode, it's just a shame the special effects were atrocious. This is probably the worst GARO has ever looked. It isn't so much the quality of the CGI itself, but more the quality of the animation. It was really noticeable when everyone transformed, everyone seemed out of proportion and stiff and jerky with hits that have no impact. It also seemed a waste because moments like this in the first and second seasons of GARO were incredible but this was just kinda awful.

It probably didn't help that this fight had no context at all. Why does GARO do this? Where the villain randomly comes forwards in the early episodes, has a huge fight with our protagonist, before running away and not confronting them directly until the end again? What was the point of this?

Spoiler alert: yes.

TOWSITD 10.

Is that Ryugen?! And the Blue Hurricaneger?! Anyway, how is Ryugen listening to Bright Hope? Didn't Ryuga destroy that recording?

I really have to question the logic of the Horrors in this show, it all seems a little elaborate considering how they aren't careful in the slightest. I know that eating a human leaves behind no body, but they drop pretty much anyone even vaguely in their way racking up HUGE body counts and considering they are happy to do that and don't seem to care for the consequences it seems kinda pointless for them to just build a whole independent city for them to do it in.

Once again, this kind of episode could have been good, if we weren't fifty steps ahead of most of the characters in the episode. The mystery of what is going on in Vol City isn't interesting...because there is no mystery, we already know what is going on (for the most part). So although they tried to bring some much needed tension into the show by giving us a new, uninformed protagonist for a chunk of the episode, it actually added nothing to the experience.

And it's no comment on the quality of the writing, the storytelling is great, probably better than the first two seasons (although that doesn't say much) it just seems odd that the third part of the story, requires the least amount of audience knowledge to enjoy.

Yep.
It's a tokusatsu in the 2010s, of course Nao Nagasawa is in it.

Not to spoil anything, but the show still has a couple of curveballs to throw.

TOWSITD 11.

This episode was really...really bad.

First there was the fact that I forgot the Horrors are basically defined by being pointlessly elaborate. I get the whole flavouring the meat thing, but since we never see the set up, or build up of their schemes, their plans just come across as rather meaningless. This show really is screaming for more two parters.

But the biggest problem with this episode was the acting, namely that it was atrocious across the board. Characters like Burai and Glasses McAsshole are so far in the background, it's hard to actually notice them in the first place, let alone their acting ability but Rian is constantly paraded in the foreground. I can see why, she is gorgeous, but she's almost as wooden as Andrew Gray with a facial expression that mirrors that of January Jones, who when in front of a camera mirrors a deer seconds before being hit by a truck.

Then of course was Sam who didn't sound like he could speak either Japanese or English. Or he just couldn't act. Luckily for him, but not luckily for the audience, pretty much every character around him attempted to speak English with such awkward engrishy results it went from amusing to embarrassing to please God make it stop!

Even the action didn't do much to save it. It was kinda fun to see Ryuga beating up a bunch of hookers so violently, and with such glee, but the actual main Horror and that awful CGI whip effect thing was utter rubbish. It's a shame as well, because GARO had fantastic action, and Makai Senki improved that action ten fold but this just feels like a thousand steps backwards and in the wrong direction. All the Horrors are the same, the CGI animation is atrocious and the armour has never felt more tacked on and pointless.

Once again OST will only be coming with BD set, just like the first 2 seasons.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BXvzWq1CcAEU22x.jpg

Announcement at the Golden Wolf Thanksgiving event in November (most likely for Yami wo Terasu mono sequel)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdoOEM4wOog

TOWSITD 12.

Another bad episode...

What was with the ear thing? I thought that she pulled her ears off and they turned into swords, which was implied by the way her hair fell forwards...but then the fight started and you could clearly see her ears. Then again the whole fight was weird, it was awkwardly edited in a way I think was supposed to suggest fast motion, but it just looked choppy and none of the actors could seem to keep up with the wires, with a string of hits that visibly didn't connect as the actors still went skidding across the room.

They showed back in episode 2 when the Madou Horror ripped off his face to form his weapon the flesh regenerated back right after. Not that hard to figure out the Rivera's ears can do the same thing.

They did? I only remember him ripping it a bit of skin off.

Skin and bones from horrors are material for creating soul metal.
They kind of ignore it in the old series.
Yami wo terasu mono kind of go back and point out missing details covered by supplementary notes.

TOWSITD 13.

Not only was it the first good episode in a while, but it was the first time in this series I appreciated Aguri. After he spent the 12 episodes prior standing smugly in the background, despite getting his ass kicked in every fight, it was about time for him to actually show emotion and get down and dirty with the rest of the Knights, which is exactly what he did! If this continues, I can see myself really loving him. I mean sure his understated performance is a tad cliché but Takeru's acting is atrocious, and Rian's acting is wooden, undermining potentially two very interesting characters.

The best actor in this show though is the one who is playing Ryuga, he seems to have a lot of respect for his role while simultaneously having the time of his life (seemingly) which both makes him incredibly enjoyable to watch, but also convinces us of certain things which done by a lesser actor...would probably have come across as quite ridiculous. Obviously part of that is down to the writing as well, as placing faces, names and dreams to the victims really ranked up the stakes.

It's great to finally see them go on the offensive. I have to ask the...logic of this, though. As far as I can tell, for no real explainable reason, the Magic Horrors are legitimately running the city and for obvious reasons have positioned themselves in lynch pin aspects of society. So surely taking out all the Magic Horrors is actually going to cause more harm than good, as they are basically toppling the pillars that hold the city up. I mean you could argue that everyone is going to get eaten eventually, but as said, for whatever reason the Magic Horrors do their human jobs...for real, so taking out surgeons and politicians and the like surely puts even more innocents at risk.

Which supplementary material has that info? I only have the "book of dark commandments"

Can you tell where you bought it? It's been OOP for a while and I'm having a hard time finding it?

No he ripped off his face, or at least a good chunk of it, and they showed something that looked rather Skull like under it before it grew back.

That was long time ago...
Hopefully they will release again in renew package.

I feel real stupid for forgetting about that already :lol

TOWSITD 14.

So why is there a cinema under the graveyard?

The overarching plot is coming together finally. We're past the half way point of the series so the show really needs to hurry the hell up. It doesn't waste nearly as much time on of the week episodes that go nowhere as the other two seasons did and yet it still feels slow as hell.

So is episode 15 of TOWSITD a clip show?

Yep. Episode 16 is a big one, though.

Calm before the storm.

Skipping fifteen and jumping right into sixteen then!

So what was so special about episode 16? I'm guessing it's all in reference to the final curveball at the end, yeah? Aside from that though, I actually thought this episode was kinda weak.

Yep.

TOWSITD 17.

I'm really impressed, GARO, you've never been able to tell a cohesive story before, but this season has come together quite beautifully. I mean you actually planned and thought out your narrative? Are you not feeling well? I just hope it won't be like Barago again, where you spend ages building it up, to just disregarding it all right at the end.

I also loved how as soon as the cards were played, chaos ensued. I wonder if the series can keep moving at this pace for the whole remaining set of episodes. If it can, this series may yet become awesome.

Different head writer and director.

Although I don't like this guy more singularly, I do like them more as a whole.

TOWSITD 18.

From a storytelling/character standpoint I thought this was a lot of fun. Tousei chews the scenery brilliantly, and each fresh curve ball makes a surprisingly large amount of sense and doesn't just feel like it came out of nowhere.

Everything else...wasn't great. When our heroes randomly appeared on a lift without context or reason, we were treated to some of the worst green screen effects I think I've ever seen GARO do, coupling that with those cheap looking CGI armours and Horrors, it felt like I was watching a playthrough of a budget video game title.

About the only half decent fight was Ryuga's fight with Sonshi, and that is because Sonshi is a total badass. He deserves to be in an earlier season where he could have got an actual suit.

TOWSITD 19.

This was a fun episode in some ways, in others not so much... on the one hand, it was nice to learn more about Ryuga and have GARO be more of a...thing. The weird thing about the armours in the GARO franchise is despite being integral to the universe of their story, they are normally tacked on like the Power Rangers Megazord sections, and the armours themselves are only every really explored in episodes centred on them, rather than naturally explored over the course of the series. However the longer GARO seemed to go on, the less and less they bothered even with the self contained armour exposition episodes, so it was nice to have one at all, even if it wasn't a naturally flowing piece of storytelling.

It was also nice to learn more about how the Zaruba contract works.

Okay, so I've been a bad Garo fan. :(

The TVN sub for Blue Cry of the Demon Dragon has been out for awhile now, but I've been putting it off. In part it's because I was being a fansub snob, in part it's because I was waiting for a day when I had nothing else to do for 90 minutes.

I was really dumb to wait.

This movie was great. The story was good, the characters interesting, and the visuals... oh dear god, the visuals. This movie was gorgeous. Every single inch of the Promised Land was beautifully and imaginatively crafted and gloriously realized by the CG artists, costume designers, and set designers (the latter of whom clearly got the easy job due to the heavy reliance on green screen). It was a really fun movie and a great send-off to Kouga and Kaoru. I am glad, though, that we're not quite done with this generation of Garo yet.

If it makes you feel any better, I haven't seen it either yet for similarish reasons. Just haven't had the time :(

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSBHq05nYgk

Quick! What's the name of the song at 3:04?!

It's the first Makai Senki OP. Wikipedia only refers to it as "GARO -MAKAI SENKI- with JAM Project".

i hope this kind of scene would appear in the upcoming season of GARO : Makai no Hana

Well I just watched the first episode of Garo.
This looks to be really epic and I'm already hooked.

Excellent. Welcome to the club.

I'm a big fan of Keita Amemiya, I bought a lot of his domestic releases back in the day not really knowing who he was. Even the first DVD I ever bought - IRIA: Zeiram The Animation was a creation of his. Anyway I just wanted to show off my GARO collection, it's an old picture, I've gotten more stuff since then.

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-T..._3370847_n.jpg

I haven't seen the show, but their design are badass!

Want to get into this show badly, what's is a good viewing order to route out my watching plans??