Garo: Guren no Tsuki Episode 2: Tied Sword

Oh dammit don’t make me excited with the first episode’s animation just to have it dip in this one. Don’t tell me it was too good to be true. I think it was.

Other than the dip in animation, this episode suffered too. I don’t really know how I felt about this episode. I wasn’t too excited about this one than I was with the last one, but I didn’t hate it either. But I felt like it wasn’t flowing right. But there was something that I did want, and it was backstory. Seimei and Kintoki seem to have known each other longer. They met Raikou when finding out that the golden armor had been awakened. Raikou was being protected by the armor but he couldn’t even control it, and if you stay in the armor too long then it can cause problems. Which is why Seimei sealed the armor. I don’t know how long ago this was, but it seems like Raikou isn’t normal. He’s cursed like Ashiya Douman, the man that appeared in the end of the first episode. And…I don’t know what that means. And Raikou’s real name is something else and this all just raises more questions that I need the answer to.

The plot for this episode was Seimei and Raikou taking the job of taking in a Makai Knight apprentice from the Watchdog Center. A boy named Hisayori, whose father was a Makai Knight but he was killed outside of the capital. Seimei decides to do some looking into of this guy’s past. Also, there’s a Horror going around killing people and taking well-known swords. And not surprisingly, Hisayori is the Horror and he tried taking Raikou’s sword as it was his father’s. This makes Raikou think that he may have killed Hisayori’s father as he doesn’t remember when he got the armor, but it turns out that Hisayori ate his own father. And that part I didn’t really understand because did he become a Horror then? And that’s why he ate his father? Well, Raikou suddenly gets all melodramatic but then becomes determined and has Seimei summon his armor so he could fight Hisayori and defeat him. Of course Seimei knew about all this but she never said anything because she wanted to test Raikou’s resolve.

I’m still not feeling Raikou as I feel he’s a little dull. And I’m not sure what kind of character he is as he’s a little…everywhere. He can be foolish and teasing, he’s determined to be a protector of people, then all of a sudden he got all dramatic in the end which I really couldn’t feel for as I barely know him and this is only the second episode so we don’t know too much about anything. And then all of a sudden he became all badass. His character feels disjointed, and I don’t know if it was just me but his voice acting was off. It wasn’t believable to me, so whenever Raikou is on screen I just don’t feel anything for him? The same goes for Kintoki.

As for Seimei, I still like her. So it really does seem that she’s a teacher to Raikou. We learned that she was proposed to by the important-looking man from the Light Palace, yet she refuses. We learned she came from a high-ranking family but she now “lives in the darkness”. So I’d like to learn more about that. I worried that Raikou would be the real main character, but so far Seimei has been taking more of the authoritative role so I’m relieved. Also she has a fear of butterflies and was forced to take the job at the Watchdog Center because she was swarmed with butterflies. I guess that was cute, but I felt that a little out of place.

Like I said before, this Garo is more lighthearted than the previous one. But I felt like some of the comedy in this was random and out of place, so I wasn’t liking it too much. It can be serious to lighthearted back to serious again and it doesn’t feel right to me. You can balance the funny and the serious, the one series coming to mind for me right now is Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure as I praised that about it during my Stardust Crusaders reviews. But here it doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t mesh well and I’ll also be honest in saying that I really wasn’t invested in Hisayori’s little story. He just came and went, and he was basically plot device just to reveal some of Raikou’s past. In the end we just got more questions than answers when it came to Raikou.

I don’t know. I enjoyed the first episode a lot but this episode was a little disappointing. I’m not sure where the story is going right now, and other than Seimei I’m not invested in the other characters. I hope the dip in animation isn’t going to hint that the show is going to fall too.