English Dub Review: Tsukimichi -Moonlit Fantasy- – “Demiplane Ranking”

It seems like episode eights for most shorter anime are just transitions or fillers. Just like with Skeleton Knight from Another World, Tsukimichi -Moonlit Fantasy- is knee deep in trying to position itself into the next story. It’s stuff like this that makes me hate short form anime production. I get that there needs to be a break in the action, but when every short form anime has this at episode eight, it gets pretty cumbersome. Also, just like Skeleton Knight…, Tsukimichi -Moonlit Fantasy- dropped a transition episode that wasn’t bad by any means, but it was still just an episode that feels like a filler.

The theme for this week is “training.” The first half is Makoto helping train the orcs and mist lizards, and shifting to Tomoe trying to train Toa’s group, and ultimately making the groups really start to shine. The light was allowed to drift off of Makoto a bit, because the light needed to shine more on the outside of the core group.

Developing the Demiplane Ranking is a smart idea. It gets stronger orcs and lizards out to the front to be able to protect as needed, and possibly gets more to tend to the community later. This was great. Why? Because everyone not Makoto, Tomoe, or Mio felt forgotten for the last like three or four episodes.

The most important part of this episode is definitely going to be the rise of Toa and that group. Tomoe kicked their training off at a 10 by killing off the shadow apes in two different hives, greatly surprising me because I was expecting failure. Toa and friends are the bigger story here. I have a feeling something is going to happen, and Makoto is going to get found out by Toa and company. I think there’s a lot of machinations that could go on, and Tomoe could be right in the middle of it.

There’s definitely a load of possibilities going on with Tsukimichi -Moonlit Fantasy-, but it’s a lot of fluff to sit through to get to the real morsels of possible scenarios. That’s the problem with transition episodes. There’s a lot going on to pass the time, but we won’t know what’s important, and what’s expendable.

If we’re getting a transition episode, I’m almost wishing that we’d get a second episode to help push the story along. Transition episodes give this problem all the time, and every anime suffers when they do this. I just wanted more tangible substance.