Axess: The Man From Sharo

Plot Synopsis
Some viruses have stopped a car over some train tracks, preparing an imminent collision with the train. Luckily, a mysterious Net Savior standing on top of a car (way to respect other people's property for an unnecessary dramatic stance...) is in the area, and he jacks in SearchMan to take out the virus, seconds before Lan and MegaMan arrive on the scene.

Back at SciLab, Lan meets this Net Savior from Sharo named Chau... er Raika. Raika is working with Lan a few days to see how Electopian Net Saviors handle missions with Cross-Fusion. Wanting to impress him, Lan spends the majority of the day bragging to Raika about how great he and MegaMan are, and how Cross-Fusion works.

Chaud... er Raika, complains that Lan is relying on only his brute strength and not any intelligence in stopping the Darkloids, something he repeats about twenty two thousand times this episode. When the evil VideoMan attacks a movie theater with, um... lava (what the Christ?), Raika figures this will be a good opportunity to show Lan what he's talking about.

Lan jacks in MegaMan for literally about 12 seconds before Nebula launches a satellite and makes a dimensional area around the movie theater. At least the fucking generators don't materialize out of buses. Lan cross-fuses and tells Chaud... er Raika, to beat it, but Raika goes on and on about being intelligent. Apparently being intelligent means being Batman, as Raika goes about doing flips and using grappling hooks to get around past the viruses.

Things don't go well for Lan, as VideoMan captures him within his grasps, and begins strangling Lan with his... uh tape? Just as Lan is about to meet his maker, Chaud -okay I've run this joke into the ground- Raika has SearchMan destroy the Dimensional Area Generator, dissipating the dimensional area. Lan is a bit short on breath, but otherwise okay, as Raika chastises Lan for being an idiot. Lan hopes he never has to work with that arrogant jerk, Raika, ever again!

Critique
If you didn't get it, Raika is a carbon copy of Chaud in this show, minus the psychopathic tendencies from Battle Network 4 (seriously, who the fuck shoots at an ally?). The whole episode he goes on and on about how much smarter he is than Lan, and you start to wonder when he's going to jack ProtoMan in already.

The dialog is so terrible this episode, as Raika says the word "intelligence" over and over and over. If he's so damn smart, maybe he should look up a fucking thesaurus and expand his vocabulary, I've never heard the damn phrase come across so annoying. In the Japanese version, Raika sounds a lot younger, as do all the characters, and I can only imagine the snot nosed child actor saying this repetitive tripe non stop.

This episode also follows the formula of Lan being too arrogant, and then getting slapped back into reality, except I think they're a bit too harsh on him this time. I mean, Raika sure talks a lot of shit about taking down Darkloids, despite having never been in a dimensional area his entire life. Tell me what's so smart about not doing any research about your enemy? Lan may be dumb, but he's got a hell of a lot more experience.

I think the intention of this episode is to make Raika look smarter more than annoying, but he just comes off as a stupid ass whose overly dramatic. His idea of intelligence is really agility and taking really dumb risks. Perhaps if the writers had some intelligence, Raika would be less grating this episode.

VideoMan is a positive this episode though, as he has some really great lines, but they jump the gun so fast to get into the dimensional area, MegaMan hardly has any screen time at all. This is kind of what I'm talking about with Cross-Fusion ruining the show, because MegaMan literally fires his buster once, and then it's Cross-Fusing time. This sequence really seems cut up too, as if there was more to this scene, and I'm not sure if that's the dubbers cutting something, or if the source was really like this. Either way, this sequence is really shoddy.

For an episode about intelligence, this episode is really stupid.

Rating: Thumbs down.