Spring 2018 Anime Review : Megalo Box

A tournament or a competition involving a relatively large number of competitors for me is a perfect and good way to build many characters at the same time while having those fights or competitions as a way to tell backstories and motives behind each character. Meet Megalo Box, an anime built around metal exoskeleton boxing tournament that gracefully being an underdog for the season and ended victoriously as one of my version of the best anime of this season.

What I think Megalo Box is very good at is how they handled their character. And for me, the gear is playing a huge role in the character building. To tell the depth of the story without spoiling any of the story is proven to be hard, so this is a spoiler alert.

The main character is an unnamed man who called himself as Junk Dog, a stray dog of sorts. He was fighting with a rusty gear in underground fights before finally decided to climb his way towards the Megalonia, Megalo Box highest tournament in the world, because of the champ's challenge towards him. After watching it till the very end, now I have this view of the gears those fighters wear are restraints for each of them. Starting with our main character, Joe, who fights without gear as a symbol of his freedom of choosing his own path. He actually wore them back in one fight when he knew that he actually still being controlled by Fujimaki and left them off after he chose to choose his own path. Then we have Aragaki whose gear is actually his support after losing his feet and it restrained him to fight further against Joe. Mikio who developed his own gear just to surpass his own sister. And of course, the champ himself, who took off his integrated gear as he wanted to fight Joe equally and as a symbol that he is free from the grasp of Shirato to fight on his own behalf. In the very beginning, Joe and Yuri wore their gear as a symbol that they were fighting not for themselves and left them off in the last fight as a symbol that they were free and fighting for their own causes.

Aside from story, the art style of this anime is really out of the box. It took their time to actually downsizing the resolution to have this feeling of old anime and I think they deserve a huge kudos for making it that way. But still, I really want to see this anime being "remastered" as I want to see how the real resolution look like. The animation is fluid enough to make me believe that it actually perfect before they even did downsizing it.

And of course, the music is so much good. The electronics with hip hop beat and occasional raps are very perfect for this anime's setting itself : a dystopian future with a very huge gap between the rich and the poor. The songs themselves are very enjoyable and intense, a perfect fit for a cardio workout music and of course for a boxing match. To be honest, how the music flows reminded me of Samurai Champloo and that anime have one of the best anime soundtracks of all time. So, huge kudos for mabanua to make this soundtrack brimming with intense pressure and intense coolness. The soundtrack itself is now available in Spotify so you all should listen to them.



Did I have mention that the ending song if this anime is equally perfect? The ending song is very catchy and listening this out in the public would not make you being labelled as a weeb but a cool guy who listen to a very good set of playlist. Trust me. And of course, the ending song is available in Spotify too if you are curious.

Overall, this anime is the very definition of an underdog anime. It came out of nowhere and suddenly it is brimming with glory and victory over other anime that have more hype than this one. Just like how this anime told us a story of an underdog who rises to the top. Hands down, if you are into fighting and stuff, this anime is the best anime of the season.

(This review was previously written on MAL : https://myanimelist.net/reviews.php?id=282506)