DIGIMON BEATBREAK

Episode 14

With how busy the last few episodes have been, I guess we were due for one that's a lot more straightforward, and round two of the Glowing Dawn vs Tactics is certainly that. While we got a brief introduction to the Tactics squad last time, this episode gives us a better idea of what they're all about and, more specifically, how far they're willing to go to complete a job. Unfortunately, those lengths are a bit too overtly extreme when compared to what has otherwise been a sharply written show, and while I can still get behind them as a group of antagonists, this wasn't exactly the best impression we could have gotten.

Following their last encounter, Tomoro and the rest of the Glowing Dawn are given a rundown on Tactics, and how they operate as the largest group of professional Cleaners in the world, while we get better introduced to the members of Tactics Squad 7: Granit, Hotaruko, and Raito. Squad 7 gets tasked with capturing an evolved Snimon so Klay can sell it on the black market, and this puts them in direct competition with the Glowing Dawn when they go after the same bounty. We saw last time that the members of Squad 7 were more than willing to be a little underhanded to claim a bounty, but they take it to some hefty extremes when Raito decides to purposefully let a kid get his e-Pulse consumed so the Snimon can Digivolve and become more valuable before they capture it. Only Hotaruko displays any actual objections to doing this, and while it certainly gets across how ruthless they are when it comes to their missions, it's also such a blatantly evil act that it feels like it happened to sell them as a group of immediately hateable bad guys. It certainly worked, and I'm looking forward to watching these guys get thoroughly humbled in future episodes, but as they are now, having them exist as mostly transparent villains has just made them less interesting than I was hoping for.

The fight we get afterwards is also a bit of a letdown, as when Tomoro and the others chase after Tactics to catch the evolved Snimon, they wind up being hopelessly outmatched. This works in establishing how efficient the Tactics members are compared to our heroes, but it's still pretty lame to see Makoto and Reina go down almost immediately without putting up any real resistance. Only Tomoro and Armalizamon can hold their own before Kyo shows up, but this just has the unintended effect of making their victory feel cheap rather than cool, since it partially feels like it happened at the expense of the other Glowing Dawn members. The underwhelming nature of the fight is exasperated further by the fact that there's once again a lack of insert music, and while I can respect that the anime staff would probably rather save it for important battles, I do kinda wish they'd use it more liberally since as is, the show's regular music score can only do so much to help elevate fights. About the only part of this battle that really stood out was with Kyo's face-off against the squad's leader, Naito, and his partner Giagasmon, since it ends with Murasamemon chopping the latter's arms off, which really caught me by surprise. Sure its heavily pixilated as to not look too violent, but it's still more graphic than I would have expected from a franchise as kid-friendly as Digimon. I suppose if nothing else its evidence that the producers of this show weren't exaggerating in their claims to push this show beyond the franchise's usual demographic. Interesting as that was, though, I otherwise didn't get much out of this fight, and while it certainly wasn't awful, it was also one of the weakest ones we've gotten so far

Still, while this episode wasn't as exciting as I hoped for, it does at least manage to provide some good setup for where the rest of this arc could be going. In the middle of learning more about Tactics, the Glowing Dawn kids discover hints of a government cover-up regarding the bomber incident they dealt with last week, and how it might be connected to a recent series of disappearances that have happened near jobs Tactics was taking on. This implies that Tactics are being used as the frontmen for some larger conspiracy. We aren't given any hints as to what it could be, but it does at least give them more to do beyond simply existing as edgy rival characters, so I hope that whatever this leads to will make up for their weak introduction. We also see in the aftermath of the battle that Naito isn't above using corporal punishment when he hits Raito for failing the mission. While this doesn't really serve to make Raito all that sympathetic, considering he was more than happy to leave a kid in a coma if it benefited him. Similar to Haruko in her pair of episodes, his cold behavior is clearly a product of his environment, so it'll be interesting to see how he's affected by being pitted against someone as emotional as Tomoro. That's all for the future, though, and as far as this episode goes, I wouldn't call it a bad one, but it is a bit of a step down from the show's usual standards.

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DIGIMON BEATBREAK is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.