Kaiju No. 8 ep 3: A hodgepodge of cliches

Kaiji No. 8 episode 3 review

Is it possible for one show to borrow from every shounen series ever written in the matter of three episodes? Consider:

• Large monsters attack city which produces a defense force, and the main character becomes one of those monsters himself. Gee, I wonder where I’ve seen that before?
• But it gets worse. Now we have a scene where we find out how powerful each character is. The main character’s rival, established in this episode as Shinomiya, is by far the strongest with a 46%. The main character himself? A 0%. Hmmm… I wonder if I’ve seen this before… oh, right, Black Clover.
• Okay, but we at least aren’t going to have an exam arc like Hunter x Hunter… nope, we’ve got that too.

So, I don’t know. Kaiju No. 8 appears to be the biggest cliched show I’ve ever seen. Everything about it is borrowed from somewhere else. Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You could argue that a truly great book/movie such as The Hunger Games was completely borrowed from all sorts of previous stories. There really is nothing new under the sun. So, it’s not fair to write Kaiju No. 8 off even though I’ve already seen it before.

But that being said, it’s got to get to the point where I feel like it’s got some sort of uniqueness, or else I’ll just be napping through episodes trying to get through them. I’m already close to that as it is. Kafka, or “Sir” as he seems to be called more times than his actual name, needs to have some sort of uniqueness to his character rather than being a hodgepodge of different shounen MCs. Mina needs to be more than just a pretty face; we need to actually see her do something.

Oh, and Shinomiya? She’s actually pretty cool. My hope and prayer is that she doesn’t end up Sir’s love interest. She does SAVE Sir in this episode, which is pretty lame because I thought we were actually going to get some conflict from him having to use his kaiju powers. So, yeah, she SAVED Sir, but she’s really the only character that doesn’t feel stolen from another anime.

3-episode rule? It passes. But keep in mind that the 3-episode limit doesn’t mean that a show is safe. For example, I recently dropped Banished from the Hero’s Party after 6 episodes. So, Kaiju No. 8? You’re on the clock. Fail to impress me much longer, and I’ll cut you loose. There’s just too much potential that I believe this show still has that I can’t drop it quite yet.

Best girl of the episode: Shinomiya

Episode rating: 6/10