Overview (Spoilers Below):
Harghent the Still and Lagrex the Butchering Landslide seek a dragon. Elsewhere, an ooze appears.
Our Take:
This week’s episode brings us yet another new set of Shuras seeking dominance through the upcoming Royal Games, where the unknown hero responsible for slaying the Demon King will appear. One of them is a seemingly formidable Shura whose scales are as white as snow, and no, I’m not talking about Snow White. I’m talking about Lucnoca the Winter, a compassionate dragon-type Shura who’s strong enough to bring a harsh wintery hell and overpower her opponents. That includes Lagrex the Butchering Landslide, who vows to defeat her with his strength. Spoiler alert: it didn’t end well for the “courageous” warrior. The episode also saw Lagrex’s companion, Aureatia’s sixth general, Harghent the Still, who asks Lucnoca to attend the Royal Games.
While the first half’s plot didn’t interest me as much as others, it offers another serviceable example of the show’s mixture of 2D and CGI, the latter of which was used for Lucnoca. Ishura is usually known for portraying dragons and wyverns through 3D animation. Some of its creatures look a bit rough around the edges, while others are tolerable in terms of how they blend in with the 2D environments. This episode is unsurprisingly no exception, thanks to Lucnoca, and I have to say that she doesn’t look as off-putting as the rest of the dragons in previous episodes.
Conversely, the second half managed to get the episode back on track with another formidable Shura. Psianop the Inexhaustible Stagnation is an intellectual ooze that has ambushed the village belonging to the wolf Beastman clan and comes across an old ally from his past: Neft the Nevada. This confrontation explored the history between the two as they were formally allies in the fight against the Demon King, but tensions ran high when the party abandoned Psianop. This resulted in Psianop on a quest to become as strong as Neft, which would lead him to the Royal Games to find the unknown hero. Amid the show’s formulaic structure, the episode’s second half was able to improve itself over the first half, mainly due to the characters’ history. More importantly, it’s another episode that benefitted well from its stylized animation, primarily for the battle between Psianop and Neft.