English Dub Review: Fire Force “Road to the Oasis”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Shinra and the team dock at a Chinese port, which also gives Jaganoto a chance to visit with his mom before they hit the road. She tells him about something that’s been tearing up their potato fields, though the team heads out before long. They drive across a rocky area that pumps out a gas that makes everyone loopy (except Licht, who wears a gas mask), but their gassy fun is interrupted by the arrival of a talking mole, Scop, who leaps onto their jeep while being chased by a giant rock snake. He offers to give them directions, but also gives himself away as the potato thief attacking Jaganoto’s parents’ fields. Seems he’s trying to get back to an “oasis” that he and his friends were driven out of, among them a talking crow named Yata who also shows up.

The Fire Force soldiers are naturally perplexed by meeting a couple talking animals on their trip but decide to listen to what they have to say, not that they know how they became able to speak. They and other animals previously resided in this oasis but were driven out by a group of Infernals, some of whom have been around for centuries and hanging near unstable lava areas. The oasis itself is quite beautiful, but what sticks out like a sore thumb is the “Tabernacle” structure which is a dead ringer for Amaterasu. That alone raises a lot of questions and implications, including that, if this Tabernacle was created first, the established history of Amaterasu might not entirely accurate. That will have to wait as they encounter some more Infernals, some of them even dogs. Shinra then starts getting voices in his head, just like an Adolla Link, of someone telling him to “protect the forest”.

OUR TAKE

We’re officially onto the next arc, which is proving to be a totally different beast than the previous one of this season. Besides this taking place outside of the Tokyo Empire for the first time, which I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, we’re also dealing with very different problems and threats than simply finding and fighting Infernals. I mean, that still seems to be the main threat, but that’s among a bunch of new things to worry about, and even that seems like it will be handled in a significantly distinct way compared to how we usually see it. The clearest example of how things are different so far is definitely the talking animals, which is certainly not what I would have expected despite that being a staple of fantasy stories for quite some time. I dunno, even with all the magical firefighting and fire zombies, I never quite put together the idea of talking animals being a product of this weirdness, though maybe we’ll get an explanation for how this all came about in the coming episodes. The jury is out on Scop and Yata as characters right now, since they could go either way on being compelling or annoying.

The other big thing to talk about is what the discovery of this Tabernacle means for the search going forward. The mission this team is on is to find things out about Adolla Bursts and how they were connected to the Great Cataclysm of two hundred years ago, but this discovery puts a bit of a wrinkle in what to actually look for. It was also going to be something heavy that warped the map so much that China was reduced to a peninsula, but now it looks like that thing might be very much connected to the creation of Amaterasu in Japan. Whether the two were made by the same people or if influence was taken from this is hard to say, though again, we’re likely to learn a great deal throughout the remainder of this arc. The Tokyo Empire has always had this air about it regarding covering things up, which is already something going on among the Fire Force companies, so it wouldn’t be that much of a surprise that their creation myth is, well, a myth. Whatever that leads to, however, I am certainly plenty intrigued already and look forward to whenever the next episode drops.