Toriko faces off against the GT Robot in a fun fight but the villain continues to be a huge weak link.
What They Say:
Enraged by the heartless attack on the mother Battle Wolf, Toriko pushes his body to the limit in a knock-down, drag-out brawl with the seemingly-indestructible GT Robot!
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Toriko has gone on kind of an odd path for the last episode or two, which is really saying a lot considering the nature of the series, as it’s dealt with this arena and the Battle Wolf specifically that has her fighting to save the life of her little cub. It’s had its moments and we’ve gotten to see Toriko unleash his strength to some degree, but it’s also introduced the first real element of evil into the series with the mysterious group that’s orchestrating all of this. Where this episode goes by introducing the GT Robot that Toriko gets to fight only adds to the strangely disjointed nature that this arc seems to exhibit. There’s something about it from the very start that has simply felt off, though at least in the first couple of minutes we get an understanding of the creature that we had seen before in the previous arc that staggered out from the darkness and walked right by Toriko.
This whole experience has in the end really just set off Toriko. His philosophy when it comes to dealing with Gourmet Hunting has its own specific set of rules with what he’ll do when it comes to hurting animals and other things in nature, but there’s one thing that really frustrates him. Every time he gets angry, truly angry, it’s always because of the actions of another human, and he’s like that after what was done to the Battle Wolf by this robot. Because of that, we get to see a fairly intense fight unlike anything we’ve seen before from Toriko as the GT Robot has a less primal approach to it in its fight, but it’s no less dangerous as it goes after Toriko with a different kind of intensity. The fight definitely has its interesting moments, but it feels so forced and overly intense that it’s hard to really get into it.
Thankfully, the fight doesn’t dominate the entire episode and just fills up a little more than the first half of it. As it gets past it, the show doesn’t help itself any when we see the creature that was controlling it as he comes across as a whiny little boy more than anything else, regardless of appearance. It’s not good when your early looks at the bad guys of the series only make you roll your eyes. While he’s not the main villain, he does have a low-grade Dragon Ball villain feel about him. On the flip side, Toriko shows off his caring side a lot as he deals with the Battle Wolf and its cub after the events of the fight and it’s designed to show us that Toriko really is a nice guy and very caring and considerate, the big heart character that can kick serious ass when needed. It’s all a bit much though, even if it does fit in with what we’ve seen in the past. You just get overwhelmed by how blunt it is.
In Summary:
Toriko has been a fun show from the start but as it’s introducing a larger layer to it with the bad guys, it’s coming across in a really poor way for me. There’s something about these characters that just pushes me away from them and often makes me cringe with their performances. If it had been this way from the start, it’d be one thing, but the show had set a particular tone and this doesn’t feel like it fits within it, even though it does overall. This episode at least finishes out dealing with the events of the Battle Wolf, so I’m curious where it will go from here and hope that the villains improve in their quality and in their motivations. Right now, Toriko is a show that is going to have to work to regain me as someone who will enjoy watching it rather than juts tolerating it because of these last couple of episodes.
Grade: C-
Simulcast By: FUNimation
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.