Ressha Sentai Toqger Episode Seven Review: Actual Imagination!

For this episode of Toqger we actually get a sense of imagination from this series. Sadly that is really the only good part to this cliche ridden episode as Hikari gets mad because Kagura broke his toy, oh no!

So there is barely anything all that good in this episode as it's heavily predictable and there is barely any humor to back it up. Now there was a saving grace, but I will get to that later. The whole thing with Hikari being mad about his toy being broken, I so knew he would think he went too far. Then for character movement the only thing I can say is that there is more shipping fuel and it has to be a really bad fan fiction reason because that is at least better than nothing. Literally there was no actual reason for these two to be closer friends or it is because of fights and apologies. Maybe it's because Hikari actually did open up towards another character about his feelings and in general he was more expressive in this episode, proof is in the picture up above. So with the actual chemistry not feeling the best how were the characters in this lab experiment.

First of all I have to say at first Kagura felt like she was having no movement with her character because she was just stuck in her imagination. She does some ninja role play and this makes me wants to watch Kakuranger. The thing is that there was barely any ninja role play for the rest of the episode and in a way they were actually teasing it. It's like there was some comedic build up for once. It's something I was not expecting and it's thanks to how Kagura was used in this episode. In the end her powers were used and in control and that is something I really loved. I will get into more detail about those moments, but first of all I'm giving credit to Kagura because she gave some creativity to the episode. Also her powers have been in control and in good use, character progression! I am just so happy that after seven episodes there is another moment of character progression making it two times so far. Kagura if you stay like this you can be bearable!

Hikari then as I said he did show more emotion in this episode and did open up to Kagura. It seems the show is actually not doing that bad of a job with dual focus episodes. I remember many of the Right focus episodes where I just hated it, but the Tokkai and Mio episode was nice and the character use in this episode was good as well. So having Hikari starting to open up was good. The whole cold act was starting to get annoying. Either way he is already reminding me of Souji from Kyoryuger, but in that one episode it felt a slight better than most of Souji's progression because that character barely ever moved. Sadly there is a black sheep in the whole thing.

The predictability of the whole thing really made things terrible though. These two characters have problems with each other, the monster of the week handicaps the other three members, and now these two have to work together. Sadly the whole pacing of this cliche episode really went off that track near the end as I did see Hikari apologizing to Kagura coming. This just felt boring for the majority of the episode which is sad because things could have been done better. Maybe Kagura could have kept things a secret from everyone as everyone just wonders what the hell is wrong with her as she cannot confront Hikari. It would at the very least give some sense of thought to what could have happened. Then they easily could have hinted it with Kagura playing ninja in the middle of a fight or something like that. Overall just try to change the usual formulas, this can make the series a bit more redeeming then.

There were still nice surprises in this episode like how the MOTW got the three other members with his stamps and made them lazy. At first he only had one stamp hand and then he grew another one and got Tokkai. Reminding me of that, it was funny when Right got hit by the stamp, the four were acting more like a team without him. Other than that the only other surprise was how Hikari and Kagura fought the stamp monster. So far this is my favorite part of the series, as Hikari and Kagura use Kendama tricks to defeat the monster. Kagura imagined herself to be a rock pretty much as she held onto the railing that extended out from Hikari's ax. He was bouncing her around and tricking the monster as he moved her towards and away at perfect timing. The best part was when the monster came for the attack, the two switched their color resshas and then switched their weapons thanks to the transformation switch. This then made Hikari the attacking member as Kagura held onto the ax. This was literally one of the most imaginative things I have seen from the series and in Sentai for a while, hopefully the series can keep that up.

Then that's really all I got to say about this episode. It's heavily bare as there are many little things that we have seen in the series already so I don't even want to talk about them. The amount of content in this episode is much lower and yes there was Wagon, but I don't even want to get on with that. I have talked about how Kyoryuger played it safe and that just made me angry, but Wagon makes me mad that I drew blood from my fingers and nails as I was scratching them on my wooden chair. I can safely say this, Wagon is the worst comedic relief I have seen in Sentai so far. So other than that there were good surprises in this episode, but they come so late. The rest of the episode is very bland and the amount of content is even low. This episode reminds me of episode sixteen of Kyoryuger as the saving grace comes way too late even if it was awesome. With that the episode gets a D+

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