With her new crew at hand, Marika sets out to the stars. If they can figure out how to start the ship.
What They Say:
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The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With the Bentenmaru’s crew taken down by a quarantine in the last episode, Marika found herself in a real bind as she got to learn more of the business with what’s involved in regulations, the license and more. Not flying for a month will cause her to lose her license, which got her to work towards getting a temporary crew to take on some jobs and ensure a future for her ship. Unfortunately, and amusingly, everyone has refused due to Chiaki’s father, a pirate himself, telling everyone not to sign up with her should she ask. That’s made things complicated, even more so now that she knows, but also gave her a better look at how other licensed pirates and those that fly the space lines operate and are like.
With that problem, Marika finally went in the direction I expected her to go at first by grabbing her friends form the yacht club and using them. With a little bit of fun, using them and the Odette II to get into space and to do a training mission and “a bit of piracy” as well gives it a kind of fun feeling that you can tell is the right approach for these kids and their personalities. Seeing their pleasant enthusiasm for what they’re doing, sneaking from the Odette II to the Bentenmaru, is charming and kind of silly when you get down to it, but it goes back to earlier in the series as well as they simply admire the view from space and all it entails. Watching them go through this at the same time that the real crew is stuck in quarantine and watch it all unfolding adds the right comedy to it as well.
While there are silly moments, there are some good serious bits as well as Marika gets her crew under control and to stop pressing every button while being impressed about being in a pirate ship. With the original crew working away hard to provide them a manual, secretly, it’s fun to watch them in a panic with the amount of work that’ll be at hand when they return and to see the yacht club totally get into things as they finally get underway. There’s a certain charm to spaceflight given here, which continues what we saw earlier in the series, and that helps to make it quite enjoyable. It may not be wholly realistic in a way, but you also have to believe that space travel has progressed to a level where a crew with minimal experience can handle things in a basic way. Having them face those challenges here, as well as getting out of the system before the military catches up with them, makes for a good deal of fun.
In Summary:
Moretsu Pirates is gearing up for a fun arc here but I expect things to take some interesting turns as Marika gets her temporary crew out on the job and away from the home world. Their adventure here feels just like that, an adventure, as they make their way from the Odette II to the Bentenmaru and figure out how to move on to the next phase. Some shows would cram this episode into the first few minutes or first half of the episode, but here it’s spread out a bit more in order to let it breathe and to make the characters better known. While it’s light on intense moments, when they do happen they’re fun to see, especially the final couple of minutes. The series continues to have its charms and even with its somewhat slower pacing manages to keep you engaged and enjoying watching it unfold.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
