An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Category: Seasonal Episodes

Seasonal Selection – Scarlet Nexus Episode 1

I love JRPGs.

I know as someone who is at least a bit of a gamer that I shouldn’t utter that sentence, but I do. I like it when I get a game that has a fantastical world wrapped up in a sweeping story that carries you onward, held together with freaky random encounters, eons of side quests, and probably duct tape in there somewhere. So, this season we’re taking on an anime that is literally a JRPG, Scarlet Nexus.

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Seasonal Selection – 86 Episode 11

The final episode of the cour (special pending) and if you told me this was the absolute final episode of the show and anything related to 86, I would believe you. In fact, if I wasn’t damn certain that the story goes on from here, what with a second cour announced and a whole bunch of novels past anything we could have possibly gotten to, I would question the sanity of someone who told me that this wasn’t just the bitter end.

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Seasonal Selection – 86 Episode 9

The time for the great battle against Shin’s brother’s Shepherd form has come. The episode “feels” short, consisting essentially of two extremely powerful scenes rather than a lot of little ones, albeit with a little support. Let’s take a look.

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Seasonal Selection – 86 Episode 8

So, this episode is all pretty much ‘gearing up’ for what would seem to be a final confrontation. The Spearhead is down to five, and they’re being sent on one last suicide mission, while Lena is having to face being trapped, alone and powerless.

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Seasonal Selection – 86 Episode 7

The pace of 86, at times, makes it difficult to talk about, or at least to start with. At the bare minimum for the week’s episode we saw some downtime and then got told what perceptive viewers already fully expected: the Spearhead is meant to kill those sent to it, a surprise to Lena but not really to us. And? And lots of development of the characters and time spent building the important emotions.

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Seasonal Selection – 86 Episode 6

We spend most of this episode with Spearhead, oddly enough including an extended flashback scene to when the formation was first formed, having a fun cookout together. One of the things the show does well is when it shows the 86 coping with their lives. Its very human; even in an objectively awful situation, people are going to seek happiness and ultimately cope with the horrors around them. It is, especially, thrown into stark relief when we see what the group started out as and then what they’re reduced to now, with two more deaths this episode.

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