The world in which Toriko lives continues to offer fascinating locales and delicacies. If only it offered fascinating characters and stories.
What They Say:
Toriko and Komatsu travel to the city of culinary dreams for a special dinner with a living gourmet legend! Elsewhere, the sinister Gourmet Corps reveal the secrets behind their desperate desire for the Jewel Meat!
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
After a few episodes that toned things down a bit compared to the Jewel Meat storyline, everything has now brought Toriko and Komatsu back together and they’re offer to visit Bellyfull Town of all places. While the Gourmet World is certainly amusing with its focus on the food (and how thin everyone seems!), the naming and some of the things they come across are just hilarious. But as the last couple of episodes have been tame by comparison, it has started to offer up a look at the bigger picture as well with the threat from the Gourmet Corps.
This one gives us some time as we see the key members of it that were briefly introduced before talking around the table in a darkened room eating up some delicious meals, though you’d think they’d have it properly lit and actually enjoying it more. But then again, these guys aren’t exactly the same kind as happy go lucky connoisseurs that Toriko and the others are. They are, after all, predictably evil. With their search for the ultimate ingredient called GOD and the way they want to rule over the world through the gourmet channels, it’s blunt and frankly pretty uninteresting. Every time they’ve been involved in the show, they’ve dragged it down for me.
Which is why I’m glad that we do get a good bit of time with Toriko and Komatsu together in what amounts to an amusement park of sorts with so many great varieties of food to sample and huge drinks that are absolutely cheap. It’s got a great feeling to it with all the restaurants, games and so forth that litter the place like a real amusement park. Of course, the pair can’t have just a normal trip someplace as there are some gourmet thieves that get involved, but what it does is usher in the real reason for going there in meeting a legendary chef named Setsuno, an old pink haired lady that’s quite cute and fun. It’s one of those good moments that shows the connections Toriko has, even if those connections are kind of crazy.
In Summary:
Toriko has kind of a buffer episode here where it takes its time getting to the point, and most of it is deferred until the next episode anyway. There’s a lot of fun to be had with Bellyfull Town in the kinds of things it offers up to see and honestly that’s the main appeal of it all. The introduction of Setsu at the end adds a new wrinkle (or two!) to things and she’ll be bringing in the next storyline, but it’s not enough to really cement the next arc yet. The downside to the episode continues to be the Gourmet Corps. and their foolishness as they’re over the top baseline villains that are standard stereotypical Shonen Jump style fare. Nothing really separates them out and they’re still badly comical more than anything else, essentially becoming a drag on the show overall for me. If you remove that, it’s still fluff, but far less annoying fluff.
Grade: C
Streamed 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.
