[DreamSword]

Episode 2: What's Your Reason for Fighting?

I'll say it upfront, this episode was alot more of my cup of tea.

But before we get into that, this episode features the opening for the first time! And yeah, I like it!

I don't think it's as much of a banger that Union was, but that's kind of unfair competition, you know? I did however like how much energy the OP had, as well has the handful of shots that were blatant callbacks to the OP of season 1.

Moving onto the episode itself, like I said, I got alot more out of this one than I did the first episode. This one has a little of everything, just about! The mystery aspects are still present for one: What is Dynazenon, who trusted Gauma with it? Who are the Kaiju Eugenists? What's up with the Kaiju parts dissipating? etc.

The action is alot better too. The fight at the end is alot more dynamic then what the first episode's' was, and it even goes to emphasize the importance of teamwork and training. Which, granted, this isn't the first anime to do such a thing, nor was it handled in my favorite way, but it's always nice to have such things acknowledged.

I really loved the comedy in this one too. Gauma's' antics were great, which helps to lean into the thing I appreciated most about this episode, in that it put more effort into getting me to warm up to these characters. Gauma's' bombastic personality is certainly infectious, for starters. Koyomi also gets to bounce off his cousin a bit more in this one, establishing their dynamic and giving the audience a bit more to work with.

The biggest improvement for me though is Yume, whose broken home is emphasized a bit more without revealing literally everything upfront, thus giving me more to sympathize with ontop of not killing the pacing. I also liked that Gauma's' words did actually get through to her and that she apologized for her behavior before, thus showing growth ontop of giving her a redeeming trait. Really, the only one who lacked in this episode was Yomogi, which is quite the turnaround from last episode where I shined to him most.

There are a few bits here and there that I feel are gonna serve as foreshadowing, but I'll save that for another post. Overall though, this was a big improvement from before for me, and goes to show why you shouldn't judge an entire show by just one episode. Is it the best episode of anything ever? No, but there was clear effort put it, and the improvement is noticeable, and I do really appreciate that. Looking forward to what the rest of this show has to offer more than before now!

Oh, and there is one other thing that really stood out to me.

"Instance Domination."