English Dub Review: Megalobox 2 – Nomad “El tonto que muestra su carta no es un payaso estúpido”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
Since his exhibition match with Joe all those years ago, Yuri’s student Edison Liu has had a lot to live up to, even though he can’t seem to step outside of his mentor’s shadow. This isn’t helped by it being clear that he never quite fought Joe in his prime. After learning Joe is in town, he asks for his help in sparring as he prepares for his upcoming title fight against Mac Rosario, a former boxing washout who went onto become a cop, get paralyzed, and then came back to Megaloboxing thanks to young CEO Ryugo Sakuma who go to try a new Brain Encoding System or BES. While sparring, Joe begins to get the taste for fighting again. The day of the title fight arrives, with Mac paying odd attention to Joe.

OUR TAKE
We’re at the halfway point of the season and it seems we’re hitting a bridge to the next stretch. Joe has settled into his current goal of restoring the Team Nowhere house, but fate has other plans for him when Liu comes a calling. Liu didn’t get a ton of characterization in the last two episodes since it was mainly through flashback and, as I went into last week, he served a purpose in the fight to show how Joe’s mindset was inflexible and led him to failure on that fateful day. But I’m glad to see that we’re actually getting some insight into him as a character, mainly in how being connected to both Joe and Yuri has impacted his sense of self despite being the current champion. He’s only seen as the student of Yuri and the replacement for Joe, as Joe only gave up the title and they never had a proper match over it. In essence, he likely feels like a placeholder, either for Joe to come back and reclaim said title whenever he gets his shit together, or whenever the next champion comes along. And I have to imagine that’s not a great feeling, hence why he wants a proper go at Joe.

And then we have Mac Rosario, who sure got a lot of backstory and hype put behind him for a guy just built up as Liu’s next opponent. I’m not a huge boxing fan, the most knowledge I have of the sport is watching the Rocky/Creed movies and this series, but it helps that one can just challenge the champion to a match like this instead of needing to go through a whole ass tournament like last season. It also gives away the game a bit if you look hard enough, as I can’t imagine that we’re just going to be spending the remaining six episodes waiting for Joe to finish rebuilding the house so he can fight Liu. Something big is on the horizon and Mac is probably the one to bring that about. He doesn’t seem that bad a guy and his backstory is sympathetic enough, so there’s got to be something else going on here. We also haven’t really had much in the way of a clear antagonist so far. Last season that was Yuri, even though he was definitely more antagonist than villain. The structure of the season has also been strange, spending four episodes on Joe getting out of his funk and then these last three getting back to Nowhere. I think we’re about to see a major shift to kick off the road to another big fight.