It’s been clear since the beginning that Megalo Box had something special going on.  But the series has cemented that impression with each successive episode building on the successes of the last.  One hears a lot of praise for originality, genre-busting – not least from me.  But there’s something to be said for great traditional storytelling, and Megalo Box is a shining example of that.  It’s a fitting homage to its franchise predecessors, yes, but more than that to sports movies and manga in general and boxing in specific.  The formula is pretty simple – build on what’s come before and execute it with near-flawlessness.

What we also see with MegaBox is the inherent advantage original series have.  It’s clear that this story was laid out from the beginning in exacting detail – each episode was going to end where it ended, and each twist would lead smoothly into the next.  There’s no need to tweak the pacing or add sometimes-awkward original bits to link developments – the story flows like a river.  Sure, there’s plenty of grist for the mill of a longer series here – but this show’s writers are very good at what they do, and they wrote it to work perfectly as a 12-episode series.

While it’s obvious that Nanbu-san was correct in not letting Joe go off on Shirato Mikio – that would have been Mikio’s dream scenario – he did make a mistake in judgment.  That’s forgivable given that there was time for nothing but an instant reaction, but as Fujimaki says, he got bluffed – and for a scam artist like Nanbu, getting bluffed is serious humiliation.  Yes, Mikio had a sense of the truth – but really, what he lacked was hard evidence.  Nanbu couldn’t have known that with certainty, but in weighing the pros and cons, he probably had more to lose by backing down than he did from forcing the issue.  Especially given that the Joe-taku probably wouldn’t have given a damn about his paperwork being fraudulent – the real story would just enhance the mystique.

That mistake having been committed, Nanbu is left with a series of desperation moves.  He does sense Mikio’s vulnerability on this – that’s the crux of his appeal to Fujimaki for intel to try and level the playing field.  That leads to the forced recruitment of a down-and-out former Shirato engineer – and he does bring some interesting threads to the fabric of the story.  It seems that Mikio’s gear vs. Yuuri’s was as much as anything just a part of the larger sibling power struggle at the company – the issue wasn’t that Yuuri’s integrated gear was better than Mikio’s A.I. gear, but that she won her grandfather’s backing to succeed him.

One thing Megalo Box assures us is that every set of gear has some sort of weakness (though we haven’t seen what that is in Yuuri’s case, you can bet we will – and hints have been dropped), and in Mikio’s case, it’s Joe.  That is, when your gear works by reading the electromagnetic pulses your opponent’s gear sends out (that sounds like cheating to me, but no more than any other set of gear) and reacting, it can’t help you when the opponent has no gear to read.  That does make Joe a threat, though as he says the look in Mikio’s eyes was not one of fear.  Once a rematch is forced (as we know it must be, though the tension was still very real) he’s the kind of guy who’s always going to have one more trump card hidden up his sleeve.

Nanbu makes an interesting call in going to appeal directly to Yukiko.  The notion that “the enemy of an enemy is a friend” has historical merit, and indeed they do have common goals here to an extent.  But Yukiko is a businesswoman first and foremost – she has more to consider than her personal feelings here.  It’s a mad rush to get the ceremony to anoint Mikio as the final Megalonia contestant, and Nanbu makes a desperation bet when an appeal to those feelings fails – blackmail.  But Yukiko’s reaction is to lock Nanbu in the conference room so he can’t squeal (seriously dude, should’ve seen that coming) and all is seemingly lost.

If there’s a frustrating element to the plot, it’s Nanbu’s continues mistakes in judgment – not trying hard enough to find Aragaki, not seeing through the Mikio bluff, carrying his bombshell into the hands of the enemy.  And of course, not making a call to Sachio his first act after getting locked in that room.  But I chalk it up to this: Nanbu is a beaten-down, underground lowlife who’s probably had too many drinks and taken too many punches.  He’s shrewd but not sensible, and prone to bad decisions.  That’s what got him in the mess he’s in.

In this case, though, it does set up an incredibly rousing finale – Joe racing to the arena on his chopper to bust up the ceremony like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate.  The idea of a “genuine article” is central to Joe’s appeal – and to that of Megalo Box itself.  Joe clearly is, and Mikio isn’t – with Yuuri, it’s hard to say for sure.  It’s on, now – Joe vs. Mikio, and a full-on war between the Shirato siblings for control of the company and of Megalonia.  All the pieces are in place for a fantastic final arc now, and I have no reason to doubt that MegaBox is going to deliver just that.