Rider series tend to focus more on relationships than its Sentai brother does. Not just Romantic ones, but also interpersonal and friendships. With this episode we dive pretty far into what connects our Riders, that we all love.
The majority of the episode was between Hiro and the big bad, Graphite (as well as Taiga to a lesser degree). Flashing back to 5 years ago, turns out Hiro had a Girlfriend that he was a bit of a dick to, thing is she was infected with the Bugster Virus but won’t tell the Younger Hiro, so as not to worry him.
Thing is Graphite was the Buster born out of her, and Snipe’s failure to defeat him caused the girl to die. This helps establish where Graphite came from, what caused Taiga to become disgraced as a doctor (plus who the patient he “killed” was) and why Hiro wants to destroy all Bugsters.
The secondary plot deals with a Infected girl going through a similar situation as Hiro’s girlfriend. This serves to make Hiro understand why both girls never told the people they loved about the infection, out of Love.
The fight scenes turn out decent, with a lackluster first fight (just to show that Brave has no rhythm gaming skills) followed up with a pretty good main brawl. This main brawl, the final one, is where Brave gets the DoRiMeFa Beat Gashat and kicks it to level 3. Graphite takes a critical finish, but manages to escape.
My Thoughts
In the end this was a good episode. I enjoyed how this episode tied together the back stories for both Hiro and Taiga; it may have been a cop out but was good none the less. The fights unfortunately brought down my overall enjoyment mostly due to the opening fight, which made the episode a little over average.
Rating: 3.5 out 5
