Recap

Kaito is sucked into a parallel world the Invess Game never existed, but the game of football does!

Zigg’s thoughts

I’ve always hated these shoddy movie-tie in episodes, but they’re especially jarring in Gaim because they’re so tonally inconsistent with what has gone before. Whereas the naked commercialism of what’s essentially an extended advert could be nod-and-winked away in, say, Fourze, the very heavily serialised and plot dense structure of Gaim makes them nasty glitches in the otherwise well oiled story machine. I had some hope after the surprisingly good Kikaider episode that we might get some value out of this, but while it’s not worthless per se, I didn’t really enjoy it too much.

I think for me at least one of the major issues is that rather than simply acknowledge the out-of-universe nature of the story, there’s a clumsy attempt at integrating it into the existing plat, and since that plot was very recently just SUPER DARK AND DRAMATIC that only serves to highlight the artificiality of the setup. The involvement of DJ Sagara is unnecessary too, and in fact it damages his mystique by having him appear and facilitate this goofy romp. Another problem is the amount of time spent on endorsement over storytelling. While the Kikaider episode was shilling a movie, as a story it had a clear, if compressed narrative arc. Jiro showed up, became friends with the cast, regained his memories, kicked ass and then left to fulfil his obligations. here Kaito sort of drifts into the movie universe, doesn’t do much and drifts out again, all while stuff we don’t understand and people we don’t know happen around him.

That’s not to say this episode is torture or anything – there’s some decent fish out of water comedy to be had, and it’s far from the character-destroying abomination that the ToQGer crossover was. But it’s also basically wasted air that does nothing to expand the Gaim story and doesn’t even really use the chance to tweak or play with the cast. Fortunately, we should be back on track in a big way next week.