Review: Tigtone “Tigtone and the Wine Crisis; Tigtone and Those Elemental Kings”

A wine crisis itself would be its own brand of unknowable, infinite cosmic terror.

Overview

“Tigtone and the Wine Crisis” begins with the King Queen’s kingdom in a panic: someone has stolen all the wine gardens from across the land, leaving the palace, the peasants, and team Tigtone in disarray. After discovering the gardens were stolen by a gang of Sky Wine Pirates, Tigtone and Helpy must defeat Zuviell, the Sky Wine Pirate Queen Captain. Tigtone hands Helpy over to a vampire, has him turned into one, and then sics Helpy onto the pirate band — turning them into vampires as well. Tigtone is then able to convince them blood tastes better than wine, and thus, the wine gardens are returned to the kingdom — which, consequentially, now has a vampire problem. The King Queen’s marriage and staff return to normal.

“Tigtone and Those Elemental Kings” is told as a story from Tigtone’s journal after Helpy wishes to hear one of Tigtone’s past adventures. Tigtone recants a memory about a cryptic door he came across in a desert land, which could only be opened by using the essence of four elemental kings. After defeating the Metal King, the Blood King, the Lightning King and the Pain King, Tigtone unlocks the door, but “never got around to actually entering it.” He and Helpy discover that entering the door leads them into a realm of unimaginable cosmic terror and — after feeling mentally scarred themselves — decide to charge peasants for entry to it as an attraction.

Our Take

Four episodes in, and Tigtone seems to be nailing quality control — each episode delivers an equally funny and quotable punch to the last, making it difficult not to go back and watch certain scenes again and again. Both episodes put a further emphasis on the dialogue as its strongest comedic suit. Often times, there will be lines that sound as if they were lovingly selected from a wheel of Generic Hero Quotes, giving no heed to the situation or previous character line.

The animation still lacks, but once again, makes up for it in art direction. In “Tigtone and the Wine Crisis,” Helpy’s vampire scene was seemingly more hyper-realistic than the usual art style, jumping out as a bonus to the already fun character designs. It was also nice to see returning characters, such as the King Queen — allowing viewers to form bigger attachments to the world of a story, rather than having everything/everyone be a throwaway gag. Background gags such as the drummers on the Metal King’s wall in “Tigtone and Those Elemental Kings” artfully master the subtleties of comedy — so much so that they tend to battle with the forefront of the scene for which can hold the viewer’s attention more. Also, shout out to Grey Griffin for her outstanding work as Zuviell, the Sky Wine Pirate Queen Captain! Recognizable, enjoyable, and hysterical as always.

Finally, there’s even more to notice when it comes to dialogue mechanics. Tigtone sometimes quotes the use of things, even when there is no one around to listen or care — functioning as his own flavor text for his “game.” A lot of lines even sound like they were ones that were voiced without a use in mind — only to be tossed into the salad bowl of dialogue haphazardly. Does it work? Hell yes, it does! There aren’t many shows that can rock “randomly selected dialogue.” In fact, there aren’t many shows that even attempt randomly selected dialogue. This is why Tigtone is definitely coming in hot as one of Adult Swim’s most original and adventurous (pun intended) shows in a while.

Score
8/10