NT Warrior: The Virus Factory!

Plot Synopsis
So yeah, that rain from last episode is a bit more deadly than I described, and it's being caused by a huge wave of cloudy viruses, among other things. Netcity is under attack, and if someone doesn't save it, the world will cease to exist as we know it! Shouldn't SciLab's stop making things so critical to society that if it goes away, the world will be thrown into economic chaos? Not to mention that Netcity seemed more like a leisurely activity than the center for everything in the world.

Of course, it's more important than that apparently, because Lan calls it the "greatest battle of their lives!" Seems to me stopping that satellite from destroying Den Tech city, and killing all of them while MegaMan is "dead" seemed more important to me. They can't access Netcity from the main servers, so they drill into Higsby's shop (for no real apparent reason), so they can use his server to connect to Netcity. Anyway, MegaMan and friends jack in and start virus busting, but they can't use battlechips because Netcity prohibits them. I don't know if they just aren't allowed to, or if they just can't function without authorization.

Anyway, they can't stop the viruses so they head to the Netcity sewers (because Navis poop?), and they find TorchMan lying off to the side injured. He was attacked by members of Grave, and has lost contact with Mr. Match. MegaMan offers to help, but TorchMan still considers them enemies so to hell with that. MegaMan then arrives at a factory in the cyber-sewers that is making viruses.

MegaMan, Roll and Glyde are accosted by a new ninja assassin navi, ShadowMan, who has been hired to delete MegaMan. He freezes Roll and Glyde with his "hold palm in front of himself attack," but for some reason he doesn't figure to use this on MegaMan. Just as MegaMan is about to be deleted, SharkMan shows up and throws himself in front of MegaMan, taking the blow. He throws MegaMan his Battle Chip licenses, and Commander Beef authorizes Lan to use Battle Chips in Netcity. Yai decides this is a great time to start robbing Higsby blind by breaking his shop apart and getting Lan rare battle chips to send to MegaMan. Higsby freaks out and panics, but this doesn't deter Lan from using things like Variable Sword, Golden Fist, and Giga Meteor, although the last one seems to do way more harm than good...

ShadowMan retreats and Lan jacks Glyde into his PET through an extension chip, which allows MegaMan to wipe out the rest of the viruses. With the city saved, mostly, MegaMan and friends start to head home, when they over hear someone taunting them about Grave. CutMan, who sounds stupid as shit, makes some taunts and runs off. Then Kid Grave says some real stupid shit about how MegaMan's victory actually means he lost. Yes, in defeat, Kid Grave is actually victorious... FUCK I HATE THIS STUPID CHARACTER!

Critique
Ugh, NT Warrior can not do melodrama, and more serious the show takes itself, the stupider it gets. This is really where I start disliking the show. The new villains are so much more serious and boring than WWW, and they say such retarded shit that they really bring down the show. Lan isn't exactly helping either by trying to play them up very seriously himself. The rest of the show is just hyping the fuck out of these cruddy characters, and more time is spent trying to make them look dangerous and sinister, than actually making them look effective.

In actuality, Grave is no more successful than WWW, they just remain smug pricks about their losses than WWW does. At least when WWW loses, they freak out, get mad, get in fights with each other, and are about a million times more interesting. Even worse, is that Grave is actually better than what we're going to get next season.

As if the story wasn't bad enough, this episode is really sloppily put together. The layering of the characters on the backgrounds look so shitty, especially the fight scenes in Netcity, where the characters look like they're practically floating miles above the ground, and the animation is starting to really decline. It's looking more and more like the animators and artists aren't giving a shit anymore.

Rating: Thumbs down.