YMMV / GARO: The One Who Shines in the Darkness

• Awesome Music:
  • Both openings are pretty awesome. The first, "Theme of The One Who Shines in the Darkness" is a kind of stylish epic song, while the second, "Isshoku Sokuhatsu ~Trigger of Crisis~" is an action packed one that matches the feel of the second part of the series.
  • The song Bright Hope goes great with the fight scene it plays over.
• Complete Monster: Tousei Kaneshiro turned his own mother into a Horror as a child and only got worse from there. He later turned Sonshi, a noble defender of humanity and Makai Knight, into his own minion and forced him to eat a woman he had been sworn to protect, laughing all the while. Tousei turned other good-hearted people into monsters that became his servants, using them to found Vol City, where he used his crippled father as a Puppet King and ruled from behind the scenes, allowing the Horrors to devour the innocent. He even forced the Makai Priestess Hakana to painfully produce many Madou Horror seeds against her will. Upon stepping out of the shadows, Tousei has his entire family killed, even the children and his own father. Using the fact he's not a Horror as a shield, Tousei gleefully taunts the heroes about his atrocities and molests a woman he turned into one of his special Madou Horrors in front of them. A completely normal human who's just a Psychopathic Manchild, Tousei was the quintessential example of how some people can be even worse than Horrors.
• Genius Bonus: Sonshi becomes the first to break a Makai weapon with his sai. The sai really were created to counter and snap samurai weapons like the katana.
• Ho Yay: Rian declaring that she wants to have Enhou's children in episode 5.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The sound the Madou Horror make when getting sliced open.
• Ship Tease: Rian seem to become very fond of Ryuga as shown at the end of episode 12. At the end of series, she decides to stay with him. In Gold Storm and Retsuden, it is hinted that they have hidden feelings for each other.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Ryuga's sight is healed just a few episodes after he loses it, which means that we don't get a series featuring a blind swordsman Makai Knight as the protagonist.
  • Burai trains Rian to control Rago, but she never puts this new skill to use during the series.
  • Handwaving why the Garo Armor lost its shine in the first place. They say the armor used up its energy in a great battle many years ago in episode 25, but it doesn't go into much detail after that.

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