Last time we had a double length opener for our new show, showing off both some nice battles and our main characters. This time… um… pretty much just the same?
This both is and isn’t an important episode. It’s pretty clear that Warlords of Sigrdrifa, at least here at the start, is cut from the same cloth as the first half of Neon Genesis Evangelion, at least in terms of what it wants the patterns to be. It’s much more upbeat than that show, in that Evangelion is a journey of fear and despair while Warlords seems to lean much towards friendship and good cheer, but it’s got all the classic elements: we spend a little time getting to know more about our characters or, as in this episode, if we don’t learn anything new at least we see them interacting in a sort of new scenario so that we feel more attached to them, audience to the individuals. For all of this, we have one character (Claudia instead of Shinji) who acts as our focus and whose point of view we are uniquely privileged to see. We get that character’s flashbacks and inner thoughts and see everything else through their eyes.
Soon enough, an enemy appears, and it
has unique powers and abilities that will take most of the episode
and a solid mix of both cunning and strength to dispatch. The focus
is ultimately on executing that life-or-death fight, and getting out
of it with everyone intact. Naturally, the ones in Evangelion were
infinitely more intense and engaging, but that’s not a fair
comparison as Evangelion is fairly known as something of a
masterpiece and the intensity of those encounters is a good part of
what both the show and its director achieved legendary status for.
For Warlords of Sigrdrifa… it’s nice. The fighting is nice. It
doesn’t exactly feel high stakes, like the heroes could either lose
or lose something important to them, but by the same token because it
doesn’t have the oppressive atmosphere that many of the Angel fights,
especially the first (and last) few, do, it allows the show to be
more fun itself, which has its own value. And I can’t fault the
enemy design or action choreography. The foe does things, they’re
sold as threatening or at least problematic to overcome (though
seriously, failing to put a roof on your wall when fighting planes?),
it has that moment where we ask “did we get it?” only to reveal
that it’s got another trick and at least one more hit left,
everything you’d expect out of the boss monster of the week.
With all that resolved we get a little
extra character and a side dish of someone (Odin this time, Gendo in
Eva) being ominous and hinting that there’s more to the show than
straightforward monster of the week games, and the episode ends.
It’s all fine, well, and good. Last
season I praised Deca-dence for knowing when it could afford to skip
the often “required” plot beats… but there’s a reason that the
expected beats are as universal as they are. So far, Warlords of
Sigrdrifa looks to be playing almost exactly to formula, and that has
good aspects as well as bad. Unless its twist is something for the
history books it probably won’t be great, but it likely won’t melt
down into utter unwatchable garbage either. The quality ceiling that
they’re aiming for is kind of low, but the floor is also higher than
it could be.
As much as I’ve used Evangelion to sort of show what the formula is, I think the show overall reminds more of Yuki Yuna is a Hero which essentially had exactly this sort of “second conflict to establish what normal is” before launching into the early endgame, and has a closer-to-matching tone and feel, especially since Azu and Miko here are kind of reminiscent of Fu and Yuki Yuna, respectively. In both cases, at least right now I feel that the Sigrdrifa character is more exaggerated and single-noted. Azu is the prickly strategist with an ego and those traits are more pronounced than they were for Fu. Miko is the fun and cheerful one, and doesn’t have the same internal challenging living up to that ideal that Yuki Yuna did. I guess one could also compare Sono to Togo, but I don’t think we’ve gotten a good enough read on Sono to know if that really fits.
Going forward, that is going to be one
of the big challenges facing Warlords of Sigrdrifa. The exploration
of the characters (aside from Claudia) we got in this episode was…
a little lackluster, mostly just reinforcing the perceptions we
formed in episode one. That’s good and necessary, but if they want
this to be a good show rather than just a show that squeaks by on
watchable by the force of its action (a bar every show should strive
for. Great isn’t for everyone but Good can be.), they’re going to
need to do more with Azu, Sono, and Miko. Especially before the
inevitable foreshadowed twist in in the show, we’re going to need to
get stories out of each of them, and some depth and complexity to
their characters. I want to know what being Valkyries means for
them, what shapes them and makes them the way they are, and who they
are when they’re sharply challenged. This is true for Claudia too,
but I think it’s much more of a safe bet that Claudia is going to get
that development. If she doesn’t manage then we’re in a worse place
than I currently think we’re liable to be in.
I’ll see you next week, but honestly I
do suspect that the next episode, possibly even the next few
episodes, will be more of what we’ve just seen this week, because the
show wants to establish the “core loop” of the characters’ lives.
Is that really where we’re going? I guess we’ll find out when it’s
time.