Another season of Baki which means another dedicated blog to it. Let's talk about the Musashi arc part 2.
Right off the bat we got my favorite character... the one and only DINOSAUR SLAYER PICKLE!!! Long story short, this is where unfortunately Pickle's decline in the series begins. His first encounter with Musashi is less of a fight and more of a skirmish since Musashi didn't have his weapons, so the fight was more or less considered a draw/no contest. The thing that made no sense here ever since I read this part of the manga is how Musashi was able to physically overpower Pickle for a moment. I get that Itagaki glazes Musashi and the storytelling of battle heavy series demands powercreep with every new arc, but this is just ridiculous. The strongest swordsman in the world should NOT be able to physically overpower a dinosaur hunting caveman especially considering Yujiro couldn't even overpower Pickle and had to use a technique in order to not lose that exchange of brute force when they first met. This echoes a lot of the points from my previous Baki blog, where powerscaling in the series starts getting veeeery wonky since this arc.
Anyway Pickle gets cut up and basically runs away, which is something that we've seen before when he thought Jack came back "from the dead", but in that case his primal pride kicked in and that fear turned into an anger strong enough to flip Jack Hanma in the air like a beyblade. No such thing in the Musashi fight unfortunately, which makes sense if you wanna hype up Musashi as a credible threat, but doesn't make sense if you wanna do any realistic powerscaling. Then again Baki has never been realistic so in conclusion... I'm just salty Pickle lost lol. Ngl though they're doing my boy MEGA DIRTY... literally. Bro is reduced to living in the sewer and surviving off hunting dogs. There's just no suitable opportunities for him to continue his previous dinosaur hunting lifestyle, which was the whole reason why he was so strong to begin with. The ultimate nerf...
Next up we got Musashi vs Motobe. Baki lost to Musashi, Pickle lost to Musashi, even Yujiro's battle with Musashi was interrupted... but Motobe wins... alright bro. Like I've said before I'm really not a fan of Motobe being the Batman of Baki where if you give him prep time and weapons he can take anyone out (except Yujiro), but I guess that's counterbalanced by the fact that he's genuinely a weakling wothout weapons as we saw in the Maximum tournament. Anyway the fight is decent and is arguably the only true L Musashi takes in the series, but I prefer the manga version.
This is also the case in
the Musashi vs Hanayama fight. There's a certain level of motion that the manga
portrays, which is pretty difficult to adapt in the anime. I would say this season's adaptation
doesn't do a stellar job translation that feeling of movement as well as some
of the previous seasons so even though the fight wasn't bad, it's one of my
least favorite Hanayama fights. I would take his fights with Speck, Baki and
Katsumi over this one any day, but I liked the narrative behind it. Hanayama
has always been someone who can accept defeat. We saw that against Katsumi
where he lost standing up, against Yujiro where he lost with a smile and here
against Musashi where he essentially accepted death. THAT'S how you write a badass!
Finally, we have the last battle Baki vs Musashi and I hate to say this but both in the manga and in the anime this is a pretty forgettable fight and has never been one that I go back to. This fight just does not compare to the final fights of previous arcs. Jack, Oliva, Pickle, Yujiro AND EVEN ALI JR were waaaay more memorable battles than the Musashi fight, but even though the fight itself was... meh, the ending was genuinely horrible.
Tokugawa's sister jumps into the ring and kisses Musashi (while the fight is still not finished) in order to quite literally suck his soul out and render him just an unoccupied body... I thought this was pretty lame when I read it and it's definitely not better when they adapted it. Just a squandered opportunity for something better to actually happen considering the soul sucking/ritual breaking kiss could have been given AFTER Musashi lost a proper fight. Anybody who taught Musashi is on the same level as Yujiro is looking really goofy right now, cuz Musashi straight up got caught lacking by a granny...
So... that was the 2nd and final part of the Musashi arc. There were a lot of ups and downs here and although this arc has never been one of my favorites, I still enjoyed it a lot. Next up is the Sukune/Sumo arc which is yet another... questionable arc, but I think I might actually slightly prefer it over the Musashi arc so I'm still excited for the Baki anime! Lemme know what you thought of it, if you watched it!
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