[Sunred]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

Twokaiser. Twokaiser.

...eh, not anywhere near as good as Stacaesar. I do think I liked this episode more than the last one, though!

It's a pretty bold move, to have Twokaiser's debut just abruptly stopping the plot in the last few minutes, completely changing gears, so to speak. I think it ends up working pretty well for a few simple reasons. One, if Zox is a flashy pirate, disregarding proper etiquette on an almost meta level to steal the spotlight is a rather appropriate introduction. Two, the episode was inevitably going to end with some kind of stalemate or interruption to put things back to status quo anyway, so having that interruption happen to be yet another new (anti-?)hero dropping in isn't that much of a difference, when I stop to think about it. Three, doing things in the most insane, non-traditional, and over the top way possible is pretty baked into Zenkaiger's mission statement as a show, so this could've been completely unjustifiable and yet still have been justified by that fact alone.

And also, this Twokaiser guy does seem like fun? Not anywhere near as fun as Stacey is, as backwards as that might sound, but still, I can see myself enjoying having some crazy dancing pirate around in the future. This is more a teaser than a proper debut, as well, so it's not exactly a fair comparison at the moment.

Anyway, since all that is more of a tease than anything, there's a whole episode prior to those last minutes that I really loved. Compared to the first half, it essentially takes character development off the to-do list almost entirely, in favor of going all in on raw wacky escapades, and I think that ends up paying off. There's still a bit of fleshing out for Stacey through his interactions with Kaito, mostly furthering what was already established prior, and the substance is appreciated (the villains in this show are surprisingly promising so far), but it's not the crux of what made this one fun. Escalating montages of everyone bouncing around a ton of locations and yet more copious amounts of fanservice did that.

It's honestly a very simple plot when you try to describe it, so I'm not even sure how much more detail I can go into. Everyone getting flustered at every turn was cute (Zyuran's reactions were consistently the funniest), and the whole dilemma was given a delightfully straightforward solution in the end. It's good stuff. It's actually kinda interesting to note how heavily these episode featured the Kikainoid team members growing giant without immediately transforming and/or combining, because that was sort of made out to be a selling point of the series, emphasizing how fresh and weird it was, and yet this is the first instance of this gimmick being used in a significant capacity.

So yeah, not an episode I feel like I can dig into all that much, but it was extremely enjoyable all the same. Hopefully things get this cool any time Stacey shows up from here on.

All I'm gonna say is Twokaiser made tambourines cool again.