Category: Seasonal Episodes

What a way to enter a hiatus.

Because, yeah, in case you hadn’t heard, Episodes 11 and 12 of Azur Lane will be delayed… to March. The reasons given for doing this seem to tie back to the animation quality. While I’ve been more interested in the plot and story structure, I have alluded to the state of the animation and… you know, I’ve seen worse telling better stories, but I can’t say I don’t understand having a desire to submit better work. When we get the remastered rerun (assuming the full run gets touched up), I’ll be watching it, but I won’t rerun an episode-by-episode look through. If there are substantive changes, rather than it just looking better, I’ll cover them in an article before Episode 11. Otherwise, this series will just enter hibernation and return when Episode 11 actually debuts.

That out of the way, let’s talk about our last episode for a while.

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And here we get the breather episode before what will presumably be the climactic set, It’s possible we might not launch right back into action; at the least, the common pacing of AL episodes would dictate we have the first half of an episode to talk things over before getting into more action. All the same, there was a lot that needed setting up, so we’ll go through how the show handled those topics.

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Enterprise is having a bad day.

I mean, everyone’s kind of having a bad day today, what with being caught in a sea full of crumbling ice mountains and ever more shattered-window holes in the sky just sort of leaking reality out into an infinite star field, but Enterprise’s day in particular seems kind of terrible especially since she’s spending a good deal of it not really being herself. I guess Kaga might have her beat, depending on how you look at it…

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Welcome back Azur Lane. We missed you. The week of break seems to have done a world of good in terms of getting the animation quality under control, getting us a big action-heavy episode with few if any of the derpy zoom-out shots and, as if to try to balance out episode 6, basically no extra fanservice slipped in. The result is an episode that feels a little story-light but that does properly represent a turning point and a solid beginning for the second half of the show.

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After last time, we get a breather episode! As predicted, the last events on mist-shrouded island are resolved before the opening, and after that we’re all back at port with nothing more needed to execute the escape. The rest of the episode… remains at port, eschewing the fighting for a double (or more) helping of Azur Lane’s fanservice.

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We start with Sheffield making her way through a fairly eerie ruined city, still pursued by the Sakura forces from last time. I’ll be honest, It’s not totally easy to say a lot about the episode because the show is, by in large, staying the course. We get some decent humanity talk, met a double hand full of new characters (This Episode: Fusou, Yamashiro, Atago, Suffolk, Repulse…) that fans of the game will love to see but the uninitiated might have some difficulty following, and then a decent action sequence. But talking about this stuff is just what I’m here for, so that’s what I’ll do.

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Just as I was talking about the need for a more Sakura Empire/Red Axis episode, we get an episode heavily focused on the Sakura Empire. True, we still got a couple scenes with Enterprise and Belfast as well as the other Azur Lane characters, but the meat or the episode is spent in Sakura territory, dealing with their intrigues.

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So, even in Azur Lane, an anime set entirely in ocean and oceanside environments and about the humanoid incarnations of warships, there must be a beach episode. I guess that checks out: the game gives you the option of a lot of swimsuit costumes for the girls, and the previous shipgirl show I watched, Arpeggio of Blue Steel, managed to work in a ‘beach episode’ as well. The question is not whether or not it’s here, but how it was used.

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