Cardfight Vanguard 19 – love is something you fight for

Katsumi makes an ass of himself ... again.

Episode 19 of Cardfight! Vanguard covers the battle between Kamui and Nagisa. It turned out to be an entertaining episode, and as many have suspected, raises the stakes for Aichi, as the regional tournament draws closer to its conclusion.

Nagisa puts everything she has on the line for this match of Vanguard.

First of all, I have to give props to the show creators who delivered something completely unbelievable that was so funny I really didn’t care. As I and others had guessed, Nagisa was able to give Kamui more competition than one might at first expect. It turns out she isn’t just stepping in, she was a regular member of Team Handsome all along. This was a very comedic episode, but they did a good job of presenting the fight. The moves went fairly quickly, but the opponents were well enough matched that the battle continued for the entire episode. This really kept the energy level up, and side characters (including Aichi, in this context) were restricted to making side comments.

Unfortunately Kamui's opponent uses the invincible strategy called "love".

In a sense this was a perfect match, because the only character more delusional (and subject to more shoujo-sparkle infused fantasies) is Nagisa. Katsumi makes a strong contender for third place, though. Nagisa’s fabricated story of how they met, and her ridiculous battle cries (“Marriage hold!”) ultimately trump Katsumi’s desire to be together with his beloved Emi. Thus Aichi will need to fight in the final round, else Team Q4 will lose the tournament. The big surprise here was that Nagisa’s brother Gouki isn’t sitting this one out, he is the final boss after all, and Aichi will have to face him.

Of course the big match is and always was Aichi’s forth-coming fight in the final round, but I enjoyed this episode for the unexpected humor, and hope to see a good fight from Kai next week. I’m guessing that Kai will win his match, but we will get to see a complete game from him, which should be interesting, especially because I think Gouki’s team-mate plays with the same type of deck he does. Perhaps seeing it in action next week will be revealing.