Okay we take a deep breath and prepare ourselves for the final tournament battle.
Oh Boy. Two episodes completely dedicated to a one-off Beyblade battles between only two characters at a time.
That sounds like a lot of fun.
Well it's kind of amusing for the first minute or so. You have a little bit of banter between our opponents rather that the Kai versus Max, Rei vs Tyson or finally Kai versus Tyson. But it only lasts so long and the very last ones even less interesting because Kai never wants to say anything.
I'm still baffled as to how these people control the movement of their Beyblades. Do they spin it in such a way before launching that it will predetermined Italy decide where the blades go?
Who knows it's something that I've talked about before and will never be answered here.
But luckily if you go on you'll eventually get over the tournament battles and we can get on to something slightly more entertaining.
Of course Tyson win the game because he believed in the heart of the cards or he powered up this Kaioken or whatever.
I'd say the show was trying to be a little bit more original than that but it really isn't. Between Takao's chippy go-lucky attitude, mixed with an obsession to eat and sleep alongside his overly charismatic views of the Beyblade game perceiving it as some sort of social activity that somehow makes you more powerful through righteous acts, we have a character who feels like an odd combination of Yugi and Goku.
His friendly rival Kai is literally the same person is Kaiba. For god sakes they have the same name.
With his Plucky Americanised friend Max the same as Joey wheeler who's from Boston* in the American dub maybe he's different of the Japanese. I never watched it so I never knew.
That is a group of dumb kids leaving Japan for Hong Kong and oh boy if you think the Americans have a stereotypical view of Hong Kong; the Japanese are right alongside him.
And it's here that we come to our first real story arc.
For bleyblade is very simple in how it likes to approach it's characters.
It starts them off as blank slates and then shoves them through a pacific area where one particular character has some sort of previous investment.
In this case the character Rei has former connections to this weird Hong kong-based Beyblade gang filled with ninjas and furry fanatics.
At least I think the character is a furry fanatic.
She may in fact be an actual cat girl. and this could raise questions about the kind of people that live in this world but then I remembered that literal god-like beings live inside Toys so maybe I shouldn't question a few characters having cat ears.
She gets the lovely distinction of being the first girl on the show which has to count for something given their took almost seven to eight episodes to get to that point. How do you forget about 51% of the population?
She's proven to be one of the more powerful characters that's recently shown up because her spinning top is able to destroy a massive cooking pot.
Which I'm firmly against.
I don't believe in destroying cookware.
If you don't want to use it you take it to a Goodwill somebody else can use that to make food gosh darnit.
I also find it funny that all the characters are freaking out about how powerful her attack was on the frying pan.
Forgetting that one character before this was able to dig his spinning top into Solid Rock and another one was able to pierce his spinning top through a solid wall of bamboo and into a cement pillar several feet outside of said wall. What this girl did to that frying pan should be a shock to no one. Also you have literal God like creatures that create tornadoes. This is not impressive! You're all just acting dumb.
So I guess Beyblades have the ability to learn martial arts? Because this one kid known as Kiki was able to teach his Beyblade how to utilise the Drunken Master stance within one of the Chinese martial arts.
Sorry I don't remember which one. I'd like to say Kung Fu but I think that's Japanese. The point is this is clearly something they had to alter in the American version cuz he can't have references to alcohol.
Finally at the end of the first tournament they show a map of the world indicating where all the other Fighters are coming from. It's the most out of date silly looking map I've seen in some time.
The Soviet Union supposedly still exists.
There's also some sort of North African, Western Asian economical Union or possibly a military State.
Not sure what's going on there.
Perhaps the Umayyad Caliphate come back into existence. In which case good on them. That must have been difficult to do in the Cold War era \ Western Colonial world.
Maybe there's an alternative history back in the first world war where Morocco and the Ottoman Empire** fuse together to create some sort of super Southern Mediterranean state.
I think colonialism in Africa might have come back only this time it seems Britain and France have really divvied up there territories in a more fair matter (at least amongst each other.) Something tells me the Batswana, Kenyan, Ugandan, Congolese and everyone else isn't clamoring for any of that. Oh and India's one big solid lump again.
Maybe it's supposed to be a divisional map but they don't make any of that clear so it just looks really weird alternative history of strange I guess.
*Brooklyn.
Doesn't matter they're both East Coast American cities and they both have stupid accents. (I love their accents by the way so get off my ass if you're upset.)
** Well hold on a minute. I looked at that map again Turkeys not even part of that big Northern purple splotch on Africa.
So I guess that out the window.
Either that or they kicked them out after a while.
How horrible for Turkey.
Not only were you the massive power going into this giant Union but you end up losing all your same Colonial possessions in the long run and get thrown out of an organization you started to create.
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