What They Say:
Coming to Rajima Volcano to heal their wounds, Leviatan and her friends decide to spend the night at an inn. While the extravagant meals, soft beds, and massages leave nothing to be desired, for some reason, the hot springs only have a little water in them. Unable to understand the reason for the loss of hot water, business has been poor, and the inn is in danger of being shut down…
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With the girls having taken a few lumps recently with all that they’ve encountered, they’re now ready to move on to the next phase of their journey. One that takes them to Rajima Volcano, where there’s some welcome hot springs that will help heal those wounds and generally reinvigorate them. Getting them to go to a place of hot baths doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch and it’s the kind of opportunity that serves to have them show off a bit more skin and get some down time, which is needed after all the action as of late, right?
Their arrival at the spring goes about as one would expect as there’s a decent place, albeit one that doesn’t have all that much water in it at the moment because of issues. The level of it works good for Syrop, which is amusing, but Leviatan uses her magic to make it better. Which works out well for her but makes it harder for everyone else to enjoy, even of it does make it kind of comical in the end. The baths thankfully figure into the show in a small way as we get some other hot springs material, such as a show put on by the “ninja” landlady and her manager as well as the girls getting a massage and the like. They get to be all girly with it in a cute way where they enjoy it really, really well.
The girls also get to deal with things a bit more difficult as Bahamut’s wallet is lost so they have to work off their time there. Which leads to the obviously straightforward and “fun” montage sequence of them doing just that and enjoying it as a bit of a game really, even though it’s actually hard work. All of it starts moving towards their mission which will come into the next episode where we get a bit more information on how the springs have been low for some time and that there may be a larger problem at hand that they can investigate. And that’s an easier way to work off their debt compared to cleaning the inn and doing the chores. Right?
In Summary:
Zettai Boei Leviatan does about as you’d expect here as they get to do the whole hot springs story and deal with all the predictable and expected elements. There’s your basic and obvious cute moments to be sure, but like a lot of the episodes it’s just a drag with its basic look, uninteresting characters and lack of any real progress when you get down to it. It’s like they distilled the tropes down to their basic components and just trudge through it without any style or connection for the view to latch onto in a good way.
Grade: D
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.
