Zyuohger - Episode 29, Review

[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 40^th Anniversary and 2,000^th 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