From the outset, the style of the film is very different to the norm, and its one that you will either love or hate, personally I loved the style, it just brought a difference to the norm. I guess to some the mix of animation and dark figure live action is abit disjointing and lazy, but its a different way of telling a story without actually having to show much to get the point across, and at times it does go complete animation, but it looks great, so I cant complain about that.
Oh, I should mention Kaoru is in this, cant really miss her since she is a big part of this special, unlike the Red Requiem movie.
We also get a new character in this special, Erda , her actress is Leah Dizon, an american come Japanese star in some circles (thanks to SacredCultivator for the info), while I was timing this, it did surprise me that a Japanese person would have such good English, it was only after looking her up that it made sense, and I think she did well in the special, bit of a background character for the most part during the special, didnt get up to much apart from serving Barago and demonstrating some Card skills (it makes sense when you see it)
Also for this we got a new Makai Knight, its one that looks like Zero but isnt Zero, so I can only assume that its the armour of the person before Zero took the armour, or is from the same Watchdog branch. His appearance is pretty cool, he has some neat tricks up his sleeve during his fight with Barago, in many ways it makes you wish Zero could fight in the same way as it would have made the fights more interesting.
The fight scenes for the most part were also done in the animation with live action and the fast paced mixing of the two makes for an interesting combination that I think works well, it keeps you interested in the early stages of the fight and aids nicely with some aspects of the fights. When the fights kick it up a level we go to the full on normal Garo fight scenes that we are used to, we even get the Goutan battles between what we can only assume is Taiga and Barago, oh and we get the obligatory "My sword is bigger than your sword" part of the Goutan duel. Baragos Goutan is sweet looking, looks more like a badass war horse than Taigas Goutan.
Over all I did enjoy this very much, its nice and short and to the point, it fills in the back story nicely without going overboard, they kept it nice and tight and interesting, it brings together great aspects of story telling and the portrayal of said story, some other shows could learn a thing or two from Amemiya Keita and his vision of for making shows and specials, after all he directed Kamen Rider ZO.
As an added bonus, the Blu-Ray set came with a set of Horror Cards, these do actually appear in the show, so its nice to get these, even if I wasnt expecting them in the packaging. I took the liberty of taking a few photos of them, I dont have a scanner so couldnt scan them in.
