Garo GoldStorm Shō, episode 4: "Axe"

[Toku Prime]

"A Makai Knight's blade is his life.
Your sword is what protects you,
And your life is what protects others."

Daigo Akizuki a.k.a. Beast Form Knight Giga makes his debut, the generic Horror suits appear for the first time in this series, Decade burns his fingers, Rian decides to drop a building on Makai, and a homeless man does nothing but scream all episode (no really, he has no other lines).​

 

[Dragonfan]

This episode was enjoyable, though some dialogue lines where pretty funny, IDK if it was intentional or not (like that conversation with Daigo and Ryuga about Rian's manners). Not to talk about the screaming guy.

I am surprised that Daigo's armour is not CG. Maybe we'll have him fighting Garo in a future episode. If not, I still see no point on making real suits to fight CGI monsters.

 

[Herman the Tosser]

Presumably he's filling the "Secondary Knight" role for this season. Hopefully he gets more than Crow got. The mix of real knight suits & CGI Horrors is a bit weird (admittedly we did get those basic Horror suits this week, but all the "Unique" ones are CGI)

There were things being said by Daigo in this episode that made me wonder about how this is going to end. The lines about Ryuga overestimating his own power and the worth of a Makai Knight's life over the lives of others... I wonder if this and other things Daigo said are just heavy signposting for a few months from now.

Also... the girl who asks them to help her sister right at the end, that was the girl they saved back in episode 1, right? I'm really liking how the episodes all lead into the next ones in this way, like Goldstorm is just one sprawling story. Makes a change from the way Flower just mentioned the Eiris/nine horrors plot, then would forget about it for weeks on end., while Raiga fought the week's monster.

 

[Toku Prime]

I am surprised that Daigo's armour is not CG. Maybe we'll have him fighting Garo in a future episode. If not, I still see no point on making real suits to fight CGI monsters.

I can understand why they tried the CGI armours in Yami. By all accounts the Knight armours are really heavy and restrictive to wear, and the crew felt that in all of the first two seasons they could never get the fights as fast and flowing as they wanted to with the suits. The issue was that there wasn't enough money to have the entire battle in CGI, so the armours were hardly there. I don't know if the Japanese fans hated the lack of a physical suit as much as the English-speaking fandom did, but hopefully having both will be a good compromise that lets us see the look of the physical suit and give them more screentime, while letting them do the kinds of fights they want to have.

I'm really liking how the episodes all lead into the next ones in this way, like Goldstorm is just one sprawling story. Makes a change from the way Flower just mentioned the Eiris/nine horrors plot, then would forget about it for weeks on end., while Raiga fought the week's monster.

I think Flower was the one season to justify doing monsters of the week like that. They set up from the start that Raiga has to find the Eiris seed and it will be hidden in another Horror that was trapped in that slab. So the only way to find Eiris is to track down and defeat Horrors. And he's hardly likely to let a Horror go just because it isn't one of the ones he's trying to find.

 

[Dragonfan]

I can understand why they tried the CGI armours in Yami. By all accounts the Knight armours are really heavy and restrictive to wear, and the crew felt that in all of the first two seasons they could never get the fights as fast and flowing as they wanted to with the suits. The issue was that there wasn't enough money to have the entire battle in CGI, so the armours were hardly there. I don't know if the Japanese fans hated the lack of a physical suit as much as the English-speaking fandom did, but hopefully having both will be a good compromise that lets us see the look of the physical suit and give them more screentime, while letting them do the kinds of fights they want to have.

That's an argument that I keep reading over and over on forums, but I still don't understand. You make it sound like in the first two seasons all armor fights are with the physical suit and no CG is used, and that is not the case. When they needed CGI, they used it, and they could do all the crazy battles they wanted (iron rafter tornado, for example), and when it wasn't needed, they used the physical armor, which you can do awesome fights with too (Garo vs Zero at the forest, for example).

So having both phyisical and CGI is not new, is what every season, except YWTM, has done before. What is new is that we have physical armor and no physical horror, so it's like having a Playstation without a controller, you have something you can't interact with.