[Sunred]

Quote:

Originally Posted by GoldenXtreme

I finished Tomica Hero Rescue Fire! Oops, two tokusatsu shows finished in one day. I think this was a straight improvement in almost every way over Rescue Force and honestly had a lot of fun watching it.

Don't you just love that transition in the beginning? Talk about a passing of the baton.

Quote:

Originally Posted by GoldenXtreme

[*]Similarly to Rescue Force, there is a real issue with excessive stock footage usage.

Yeah, my assumption on that is Takara Tomy probably spent a lot of their budget for it so they were trying to make the most out of all the combination CGI clips. I mean, I thought the effort showed and quality was slightly better than what Toei had going.

And loved how they pretty much had their own rendition of the Go-on Wings.

[GoldenXtreme]

It's Short Form Sunday! Figured I'd keep up my momentum and watch various smaller tokusatsu things I've wanted to catch up on.

Garo Special: Beast of the Demon Night
This would fit in easily as two extra episodes of the original Garo. The new Makai Knight is pretty forgettable but it's decent enough I guess.

Garo: Red Requiem
I think THIS is actually the most I've enjoyed a Garo thing yet. It's focused, well-paced, and let's us see some interesting new characters as they fight a unique new Horror. The higher budget of being a movie also helps smooth out some of the rough edges of the CGI that plagues the TV stuff. This really made me realize that Garo might be best as a film series, at least for my personal tastes.

Garo: Kiba Gaiden
This, meanwhile, it pretty awful. A bunch of stitched together flashback sequences giving backstory to a couple of characters who really, really didn't need backstory. Barely any action, heck, a lot of it was done in an inked visual style, so it barely felt like a tokusatsu!

Kikaida Reboot
This was pretty fun. It's interesting seeing how Kikaida was re-imagined and the fights were quite cool. The human characters all tended to feel very stilted though.

[GuardianAngel87]

Speaking of Garo, it took over a year or so, but I have finally started watching Garo: Demon Beast of the Midnight Sun TV special which takes place not long after the events of the original 2005 series. I even re-watched On Halloween Night and Vampire City episodes of Ultraman Tiga as well as It Came From Angel Grove episode from Power Rangers Zeo as parts of my Halloween marathon on which I'm currently doing the same for Garo's first TV special/movie.

[GoldenXtreme]

No one was around to stop me this weekend so I ended up binge watching Garo: Makai Senki in only 2 days. This one did it for me. I went in thinking Garo as a series was a little lame and boring and by the time I finished it I thought Makai Senki was just AWESOME. I think there's several factors at work here that made this particular entry finally, truly work for me.

I think the CGI finally reached a point where I didn't mind it much. There was enough cool actual choreography to satisfy me, and they tended to go really heavy on the CGI when doing frankly ridiculously awesome things, so it felt more charmingly fake than anything. I think in terms of characterization and lore things really started to come together satisfyingly. Kouga, while still extremely emotionally constipated, has lots of moments where you get to see how much he cares for other now. Kaoru, in spite of generally getting less attention than the original Garo, feels more like an actual character than just a horror heroine. Rei doesn't have random, weirdly psychotic moments anymore. I really enjoyed all the emphasis on Makai Priests in this one too, the tensions between them and the knights made for an interesting story and it was nice to see the priests really get to show their stuff in all the fights. Nice to see Jabi and Rekka really show off. I also enjoyed Leo as a new addition, it was nice to have a Makai Priest more consistently help Kouga. The mystery surrounding whether he was a traitor was interesting too, I ended up correctly guessing that he was a red herring pretty early on but I still enjoyed seeing how it all played out.

I think the episodes were also generally better quality. The one where it's all a game of poker was awesome. I loved the stage play episode, which had lots of entertaining meta elements referencing tokusatsu's theatrical roots. It was genuinely fun seeing so many characters come back and the entire climax felt like they were just slamming together every stupid awesome thing they could think of. I had SO much fun and am actually really looking forward to what else the series has in store now. Two thumbs up!