Oh? So, we get both the Grandpa retrieval and a continuation of the tournament. It really didn’t cross my mind that we would be able to do both at the same time. I definitely thought it was going to be a “win as fast as possible so we can go get Grandpa” or “Guess the tournament is on pause for now”. But what we actually got was a good mix of the two, and it made for a pretty solid ending with Mori’s match.
Ok, I’ll be honest, I wasn’t all that invested in the episode until the final third of the episode. That isn’t to say that the rest of the episode was bad or anything… just nothing particularly stood out to me. I appreciated having two story lines happening at the same time in order to fit things in, but I personally think the intensity between the two didn’t quite match. On the one hand you have Mira fighting in the tournament with someone who now has “ownership” over her sword, and on the other hand you have Mori surviving an explosion and going up against a guy who wants him dead. We don’t get to see Mori’s fight until the end, but it does provide good information as to who Mira is actually fighting. And then there’s Daewi who gets caught up in a fight in the bathroom which ends with him getting a kiss. Unexpected and pretty funny, but there wasn’t much of a chance for him to shine in this episode.
Where I really started getting invested is when Mira awakened her Charyeok, Lu Bu. I know of the three main characters, Mira had decided in the previous episode that her main goal was to get stronger without the charyeok, but her awakening sequence was really cool. And what really hit it home was her reclaiming ownership over her sword and absolutely destroying her opponent. It was short, but man was it intense and a perfect segue into Mori’s reappearance. No one aside from the three Nox guys really knows what the heck Mori was up to, but boy is everyone surprised to see him!
As a whole, I enjoyed how they approached Mori’s fight with his opponent as a complete mirror to the fight we didn’t get to see at the warehouse. I found the transition effects to be more impactful to me rather than just the side by sides (because there were one or two moment where I really think it went on longer than it needed to), but the whole concept was incredibly cool. My personal favorite moment from that fight is when they showed a close up on both of their frightened faces. Like these guys are no joke, Mori’s first opponent killed an entire team that was supposed to compete in the semi-finals of the tournament! Albeit, they were seeded, but they were probably incredibly strong. So, the fear that they showed truly emphasized the amount of strength Mori has to absolutely destroy them in the fight. I mean, he came at them with his Jin Mori Originals which I am absolutely excited to see again.
And so, it’s pretty much confirmed that Mori is a tiger and that imagery between him and his grandfather was really cool! (But I still don’t really know what that means!). I’m excited to see what next episode will bring, I feel like we’re just at the point where everything will be coming together to become clear. And quite frankly, I’m stoked to see the fights that will come out of it.
