[Locke]

Time for the final episode! Of course Sigma survived, they're ripping off the first seasons ending. Although round two with Sigma was nowhere near as awesome as round two with Kiba but still pretty cool. Although, how could Kouga take Kaoru inside Garo, wouldn't that burn all of her flesh off?

I'm guessing as there is one more movie to go, Kouga isn't dead, but man that ending was confusing. Not even ambiguous, I genuinely have no idea what happened in the last five or so minutes of that episode.

Overall, Makai Senki was enjoyable, but very far from great, and sadly much closer to bad.

You see the thing is, with GARO it's basically a masterpiece for the first twenty episodes (minus a few misses here and there) and then the ending is so bad it sours the whole experience. Or at least it soured my whole experience, because as they wove in Barago as the big bad, it looked like a fairly slow series was really coming together...then we got a revolving door of unexplained villains and it ended.

Makai Senki was in a very similar position, except it was never a masterpiece in the first place. Entertaining, certainly, but great? Certainly not. It's easy to get distracted by the flashing lights, as the action has improved here ten fold, but everything that really needed to be improved...wasn't and some of the best aspects of the first season, were removed entirely for no reason at all.

What we ultimately get is a fantastic popcorn series - I can't stress this enough, this show has some of the best toku action EVER. But everything else...just kinda sucked.

Although initially it seems we're getting a much better written, much more thought provoking GARO, chucking around a lot of interesting ideas and opinions, we're quickly reminded it's GARO as most of it goes nowhere, or leads into such garbled mythology I'm not sure even the characters are following it.

We got a streamlined villain, which is an improvement on the revolving door we got last time, but he was ludicrously overpowered to the point of boredom and despite having a long drawn out mystery surrounding him, the answer to the mystery was almost as uninteresting as the mystery itself.

And yes, once again, pretty much all of this seasons problems come under one huge header 'pace'. Although I don't forgive toku in general, I'm sure it's no easy task to keep up your momentum over fifty episodes, but what is Makai Senki's excuse when this was only twenty four episodes? This was as cripplingly slow and as unnecessarily drawn out as the first season, if not in many ways worse.

And initial saving graces in GARO, like Kouga's wonderful character arc or the genuinely spine chilling horror episodes, are nowhere to be found. They spent so much time and focus on the mystery of Red Mask, or bizarre additions like Baron who amounted to being completely pointless, that existing characters barely got a chance to do anything. Blah.

I hope this entirely new story GARO will be better overall.