[EPISODE TITLE CARD TO BE ADDED LATER]
Episode
29:
王者の中の王者 (The King Among Kings)
Airdate: Sunday,
September 11, 2016
Synopsis:
The Gokaigers and
the ZyuOhgers team up to fight Bungrey and an army of past villains unleashed
from Marvelous’ memory. Yamato takes control of the Whale Gun and unleashes its
awesome power.
Review:
First
Impressions
I was excited
all week for part two of this team-up! Not much else to say beyond that.
Put-ups
The opening
fight between Marvelous and Yamato was quite good! I liked how fairly evenly
matched they were (same for the rest of the casts). 
It was
especially nice to see the rest of the Gokaiger cast unmorphed this one. It’s
like they never left. I loved seeing them interact with the Zyuohgers. Luka
elbowing the overly familiar Leo and Gai’s reaction to a sulking Misao
particularly amused me. Then the two teams in Wild Tosai King’s cockpit was fun
too!
Seeing Bungrey
bring back past villains from the Gokaiger’s memories was nice. For this
episode, I don’t mind the recycled costumes.
I was particularly
happy to see a Flashman change! Flashman is one of my absolute favorite series,
so seeing that is definite perk. Then during the mech fight, I was happy to see
Denjiman and Liveman’s keys get used. One of my complaints about Gokaiger was that it felt like the Showa
Era Teams didn’t much love. So seeing them use older teams’ keys as opposed to
newer ones is always a plus to me.
The final Mech
attack with “2,000” in it was a super nice touch! Loved it.
I am glad they
updated “Super Sentai Getter” with the Gokai Changes for the later teams. The
male version of the Shiro-Ninger costume looked so odd to me, I guess I’m just
used to the female verson. I do wish we got a better view of skirted Kyoryuu
Black and that Beet and Stag Buster were included for the GoBusters (I assume
the Ahim would be Stag Buster).
Joe was
looking extra gorgeous (I wish we got more shots of his face).
Put-downs
Just like last
week, I don’t have any major put downs for this week’s episode.
I was a little bothered that Yamato seemingly had no knowledge of Super Sentai. The invasion of the Zangyack in Gokaiger was presented as a pretty big deal and the existence of the Super Sentai teams was treated as common knowledge throughout the series too. I wouldn’t expect him to know the details but something sort of passing acknowledgement like “Oh…yeah…we are the latest team, huh?” would have been nice.
Don and Ahim
polishing the swords and guns in the middle of the battle was odd and unnecessary.
It was really out of character for them.
The Whale
Charge Gun seems almost too powerful! Admittedly. It was a cool sequence
admittedly but having go all the way out into space and fly around the moon the
comeback? That’s definitely overkill. Though, it would seem that this weapon is
the strongest one to be used in Sentai. Granted, I haven’t seen every single
series but I have seen the majority of them and I can’t think of one as
powerful (or at least presented to be as powerful) as the Whale Gun is. I do
assume it will be downplayed a bit in future episodes but we’ll have to wait
and see about that.
Final
thoughts
I don’t
have too many new thoughts about this one. I said a lot of my thoughts about
the team-up and anniversary episodes last week, so I won’t repeat myself (or I’ll
try not too). I very much loved this episode. I didn’t quite as excited as I
did last week, but I enjoyed it just as much.
Seeing the
two teams interact un-morphed was the definite highlight of the episode for me.
I wish we got more time with the Gokaiger cast. I’m happy we got the whole team
back but I just love them so much it would have been great if we got another
episode with them around. I would love an extra episode of seeing the two team’s
interact. I feel like Don and Tusk interacting would particularly amusing (I
did like the little bits of that we got). As much as I love the Zyuohger cast,
there’s something just truly irreplaceable about the Gokaiger cast. I don’t
know if any cast will ever top them (though I would welcome any cast that
could).
My feelings for
Bungrey are growing increasingly mixed. I was very excited about his initial
appearance and how he’s mixed things up on the villain-side of things. His
ability to project things from people’s memories into reality is a really
clever ability, when used effectively. Outside from his using to torment the
populace and Yamato in Episode 24, it hasn’t been used effectively. Having
Bungrey take monsters from Marvelous’ and Gai’s memories worked for me,
especially as a way to get past foes back for the Anniversary Special (though
would the Gokaiger’s even have encountered Deboth? I guess it’s just assumed
they know everything about the Sentai Teams now). If Bungrey hadn’t been using
this ability multiple times an episode since his debut, I would have enjoyed it
much more.
His Memory
Projection ability needs to be much, much, much less to keep its efficacy. If
the writers insist on having Bungrey use his Memory Projection every time he appears,
I would just assume that Bungrey be back-burnered for a bit. Assuming, of
course, he’s going to be around for a while longer. He may very well be
defeated next week. To be honest, I really had assumed he would be killed this
week. If he’s going to continue to be used in the same way he has been up until
this point then I would just assume he had, but if he’s either back-burnered
for a spell or used in a more effective way (i.e., not to just give the show
excuse to have cost-saving shoehorned battle scenes) then I will continue to
enjoy his presence on the canvas.
I don’t
have much else to say on this one. It was an absolute delight to have the
Gokaiger back. I’m happy we got this set of episodes to celebrate the 40th
Anniversary and 2,000th Episode. I do hope we get more things before
ZyuOhger wraps. We were able to get a nice tribute to this beloved franchise of
ours and progress the story of the current installment. All in all, I call
these episodes a great success!
Final
Grade: A
