Kyoryuger Episode 41 Review: Late Christmas Present

Well it's time for me to continue on with the episode reviews. Even though it has been over a week, it still does hurt, but I need to move on. With that it's time to do a review on the Christmas episode when it's February....

So right after an episode that I really loved, Kyoryuger still does some good in this episode. The first thing I want to mention is that the premise was pretty nice as the villains plan to use Christmas, the fiends! Now they aren't going for the obvious route and have a monster start destroying gifts and trees, which easily could have been done. I give credit to the show by using anger for their plans. Dogold finds a way to have the anger of children to make clones of Debos. At first I thought the clones of Debos were going to be the monster of the week, but surprisingly not. There is still a new monster in this episode as it's a Santa monster, of course. All he does is deliver bad presents to kids so that they can get angry and thus a clone of Debos is summoned. I have to say children can be spoiled and with presents that is easily true as their expectations get very high. So it makes sense why some would get angry at these terrible gifts. The best part of the plan is that Torin can't sense when it's going to happen so pretty much it's a surprise Debos every time!

Since this is Dogold's plan this of course means he is getting some focus for this episode. Well it seems that Endolf is affecting him. Dogold is acting more like Endolf all of a sudden as he is getting headaches, saying sorry, and even talks about resentment. Along with that Dogold is finally having enough of failing so he is going to make this plan work. Now there was one part of his plan that seemed strange as he was focusing on King, great even the villains are only focusing on him. This is probably Endolf making him act like this since whenever Ucchi was around then Dogold acted more like himself. I am liking this struggle Dogold is having with himself as he still wants more power and yet there is someone powerful starting to affect him, a bit ironic isn't it.

Well if Dogold is getting focus, then Ucchi should get some as well and he does. We finally get an episode that actually develops the rivalry between this two. Most of the times when these two fight, they just fight and that's it. Then at first I thought Ucchi was going through reverse development as he started to act like his old angry self again when he heard that King was in danger. Dogold even absorbed some anger off of him and then we had Ucchi jumping into danger by himself. Thank goodness Ucchi actually learned his lesson though as he tricks Dogold so that he could save King. Then this episode really made me think of episode twelve when King helped Ucchi to become more of the person he is. Ucchi ended up tricking Dogold by acting like he was just playing into his hands and then strikes when he was distracted. Last time it was King that saved him and now he saves King. Finally, I didn't even see this focus for Ucchi coming into this episode. It was so focused on the Debos clone plan for too long that when it came up it pretty much then steals the focus of the episode. The last thing I didn't expect was that this episode ends at a to be continued, but looking back there are some Christmas episodes that had two parts.

Now with the plan actually being about getting King, how long does the Debos clones last? Well four of them live beyond the episode. I know it's Debos, but the six heroes took one down and then King takes one down by himself! This is just another example of the series just showing that King is the strongest and everyone else isn't. Even Torin couldn't defeat the Debos clone and Yayoi had the two Spirt Rangers with her so why couldn't those three win? Ian and Souji pulled off a finisher, but for some reason that doesn't defeat the clone. I would have been fine with this if the Debos part was the major focus and having robot fights last that long would be pretty cool, but this episode just lazily does it. The fights have very cheap effects and set designs and then just reuse old animations. It's worse when they randomly reuse two shots from two different episodes. One is when the first Debos clone appeared as for one sudden moment the lighting is darker when the overall environment was bright. The reason is that they took that quick moment from episode twenty-two. Then they reused a scene of Ucchi's role call as you clearly see a mountain behind him even though there are trees behind him. They are little moments, but those two moments really did show off some laziness.

And here I was thinking the five robots were going to fight together in the same area, silly me.

Alongside Dogold is the new monster of the week which I mentioned before he is a Christmas based monster so his design works, it's just what I would expect. He acts like Santa and delivers presents to kids, but I will say there were some unexpected things from him. First is that there are actually five of them as they spread out so that they could summon the Debos clones around the world. They even have an ability to combine and become stronger. It's funny to see that when one and two combine their powers and multiplied by twelve. King and Ucchi decided they could do the same and combine the powers of their batteries and with one and six they make sixteen. It doesn't make sense, but it was just a good joke. Then with only two of them down there are three more as I can probably expect the three combining along with the other two thanks to Lucky.

This episode did have a moment when they just show their love for King with his fight against Debos, but they actually put him in a corner. I knew he was going to be saved, but to be honest I was thinking he was going to save himself. Thanks to the team taking robots around the world and with Amy and Nossan using Kyoryujin, King couldn't use Carnival mode. With the power of the combined Santa monster he defeats King and Dogold captures him. Then with King and Ucchi defeating the two, Dogold comes up to kill King and then his father comes out of nowhere. King even asks why he is here and he just says that the melody of the world told him.... He was just there to get Dogold all hyped up about getting another body since he remember the time both him and his father punched him into the sky. Overall, this episode still has some bad King focus, but they did actually put him in a corner and it took another teammate to get him out so there's that.

King: "Oh you guys training, too bad this is my scene now!"

I already talked about the robot action with my disappointment in the bad effects, but there are other things to mention here. First is how the team got dumb all of a sudden. With the first clone the team had to pull out strong attacks to take it down and so they did. King even did this with his solo fight, but everyone else was just doing standard attacks. This was pretty much for budget reasons, but it still bothers me. Another thing to consider is how long the other members are fighting these clones. The first clone only took like a couple of minutes and the same for King's fight. For some reason though it takes over twelve hours and yet they are still fighting them. There was a redeeming factor with the fights though which was the normal fight. As I said King and Ucchi combined their powers by switching batteries around as I loved seeing Ucchi's sword grow a mouth and teeth and while biting the monster. Then King just had a slash finisher, a little anti-climatic follow up for a cool attack I have to say. A nice touch though was Kyoryu Gold's theme which is my favorite of the series so it's good to hear that song again.

This episode is okay as the premise with Debos clones did have a good start and great build up, but in the end it goes for too long and the series has to cut some corners to do that then. Along with that for some reason they really got lazy with this episode as there are more reoccurring shots other than the two I mentioned. I am liking Dogold's issue right now, but I can easily see this coming up much earlier than episode forty-one and Ucchi's development is good and yet I have the same issue with it as well. The ending to Ucchi's and Dogold's rivalry so could have came earlier and I fear that it could really be a short and anti-climatic ending. So I would give this episode a C because at least the monster of the week had some surprises and half of the episode with Ucchi and Dogold kept my interest.

Next Time: Alright series you better not be teasing me again with the robot fights!