How would you rate episode 7 of
Sadly, I think this might be the first episode where Overgeared just really kinda lost me. Its attempts at trying to humanize Grid are still a bit of a mixed bag, and while I'm not totally opposed to the idea, that approach still requires a certain amount of pushback against him to work. Without that the series runs the risk of trying to have its cake and eat it too, which unfortunately describes a lot of what happens with our resident snarky gamer this week.
For one thing, I was kind of expecting that we'd see more of Huroi and Grid bonding after the former's big “sacrifice” since Grid seemed at least a little touched by the gesture. Surprisingly though, Huroi is nowhere to be seen this week, and the most amount of mention he gets otherwise is Grid drooling over all the enhancement gems that he nabbed thanks to his efforts. Considering that Grid seems as callous as ever, perhaps it's for the best that we were spared a few minutes of watching him continue to bully Huroi for daring to be in his presence. Still, it does make their team up against the orcs seem kinda pointless beyond giving Grid more items to mess around with. That's not the only awkward gag to come out of that whole though, as Grid wastes little time trying to enhance his knife, only to get a little too obsessed with bigger numbers and burning through all the gems he got. Normally I'd be all for watching Grid's luck blow up in his face, but knowing that he was going to sell the gems to help with his family's debt before his impulses got the better of him kinda sucks a bit of the comedy out of it. It's easy enough to laugh when he's the only one suffering from his hubris, but now that the potential livelihood of his family hinges on him having a little more self-control, moments like this only serve to make him more unlikeable.
Still, most of that just amounts to a couple of jokes not landing, so if that were the extent of this episode's shortcomings it'd be hard to be too harsh on it. Where it really stumbles, though, is in its big attempt at drama which just kind of left me confused as to what it thought it was accomplishing. When Grid goes to complete the last leg of his job quest, he has the misfortune of running into some old high school bullies in peril who don't recognize him. This gets Grid caught between doing the right thing by helping them, or taking some sweet revenge by making their situation even worse. Considering the kind of person Grid is, it kind of goes without saying he chooses the latter option, but he quickly finds that it doesn't feel as satisfying as he would have imagined. Revenge ultimately feels hollow, and when he's offered the chance to take on a high level quest by a knight seeking some vengeance of his own, Grid turns it down, having learned that it won't fix his problems.
Now most of what I described seems like a decent enough moral lesson, but in practice it comes off as extremely awkward. The biggest problem is that while this isn't exactly the first time it's been mentioned that Grid was bullied in the past, it hasn't come up enough to be integral to his character. That makes this reunion feel like little more than cheap melodrama, and since Grid still isn't all that charming on his own, all we really witness here is one unlikeable character being cartoonishly nasty to a bunch of other unlikeable characters we've only just met. It's also one instance where the punched up nature of the dub script works against the show rather than for it, as whatever emotional turmoil Grid is theoretically meant to be feeling here is kind of muddled by cracking his usual zippy one liners in between his bits of angst (though honestly even if the scene was played completely straight I'm still not sure it would have helped much). Again, I'm mostly okay with the idea of Grid being given more of a personal arc, but it does require the show to pick a lane between reveling in his worst tendencies for laughs, and wanting us to pity how rough life has been for him. At the moment, it feels like the show is trying to do both and it's simply not working.
In between all this, there's also been the looming threat of some mysterious cult within the game that's been steadily gaining influence. While that's been brewing in the background for the last couple of weeks now, the show is still squarely framed around Grid's perspective. Since none of it has so far had anything to do with him, it hasn't really amounted to much beyond cut aways in between Grid's antics. Now that their rise to power has involved most of Satisfy's player base, it seems as though that whole situation is finally set to become Grid's problem. What exactly that means for him is a question probably to be answered next time, but if that answer involves any more attempts at serious drama, I can only hope they're an improvement over this week's poor attempt at a PSA on revenge.
Overgeared is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.