[Fish Sandwich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by FairyKing

So yes, it is a slightly rearranged repeat of the previous arc, but they went through all the beats except the ending in the first episode, so there's still a lot of room for twists in the second.

It is true that this episode isn't literally identical to 17, but I find the beats they pulled from 18 don't do a lot to alter the basic structure.

Both episodes can be summarized way too similarly for my liking. They both start with Aruto and Gai chatting at that same exact table. They both have most of their runtime devoted to introducing us to the two players for the contest, a polite, gentle Humagear, and an arrogant human, and they both end with said Humagear turning into a Magia, and Zero-One awkwardly flailing around trying to protect/fight them while Thouser smacks him around, steals his powers, and then beats it himself.

I know you can make a lot of things sound similar if you oversimplify them enough, so that doesn't necessarily prove anything, but I'd have a way harder time doing that with the show's episodes from last year. Even trying to give this episode a chance by ignoring early plots like "the heroes explore the site of the tragedy that forms the show's backstory", and "Jin tries to figure out what a family is", the ones that boil down to "Aruto tries to do business stuff but a Magia ends up attacking" feel way different. Episode 3 was about a guy who refused to believe Humagears could do a job as well as a human. Episode 5 was about a guy who believed Humagears could do his job so much better than he could, he turned into a lazy slave-driver. Plus, the action always felt different too, with all the new forms and Riders constantly showing up.

This show was doing great with standalone episodes, and this sudden shift into more traditional two-parters doesn't seem to be contributing anything positive at the moment.

Again, I want to stress that this isn't a bad episode in its own right, and that I'm not too worried about the show's future or anything, but this one just felt really lacking in substance compared to what we've been getting, and I don't see why it needed to be.