What They Say:
The National Federation of Ingelmia has declared war on the United Kingdom of Arandas in its conquest of expanding its borders. Susumu Tokimune is a new pilot for the Arandas army and during a mission he encounters an armored vehicle containing a robot called Argevollen as well as a young girl named Jamie Hazaford. After saving Jamie’s life, Susumu becomes the pilot for the Argevollen and uses it to battle against the Ingelmian forces.
The Review:
Content (please note that portions of this review may contain spoilers):
With last week’s episode delivering on the much needed confrontation between Susumu and Captain Samonji, this week brings us into full flashback territory as we discover the actual fate of Reika Nanjo. In the past, Captain Samonji and a couple of other familiar faces were part of a group assigned to guard Reika while she participated in the military’s experience. She immediately comes off as an idealist, wanting to create a war where no one dies and is participating in an experiment involving controlling remote units to accomplish it. This kind of idealism clashes hard with the by-the-book soldier boy attitude of Captain Samonji at the time and the relationship between the two gets off to a rough start.
The gap between the two begins to shorten though when Samonji witnesses her having a breakdown after one of the tests. Reika calls him out afterwards and claims to admire his mostly stoic atttitude towards everything as he can watch over people well that way, and she asks him to continue looking out for her. Captain Samonji begins to lighten up a bit after that, and the whole group gradually starts to get closer. Back in the present. Susumu is still having trouble taking it all in as the sub-commander tells him that things could have turned out pretty differently for the Captain had everything continued that way for them.
Of course, things didn’t end well for the Captain, and just how badly they did gets shown in full display when one of the tests goes wrong and all of the unmanned machines start to go out of control. The base starts getting destroyed as a result and the higher ups decide to have the machines terminated and Reika along with them. This doesn’t go over well with the normally stoic Samonji and he starts assaulting some of the other officers before going off to rescue her, showing why he’s on their blacklist. In the end however, he’s too late to save her as the machines end up turning on Reika and she’s gunned down, with her final words to the Captain (of course) being left unknown. Susumu reacts with anger to the end of the story, but returns to duty after getting released and still seemingly with respect for the Captain though his exact feelings aren’t yet known.
In Summary:
This week’s episode follows up the ending to last week’s with some of the strongest material in the series so far. Seeing exactly what happened to make Captain Samonji the way he is was much appreciated, and packed an emotional punch that had been mostly missing from the series so far. It’ll be interesting to see how the relationship between him and Susumu continues to play out after this event and if it’ll ever be repaired or just get more strained. Hopefully the upward trend will continue on to next week as well.
Overall: B+
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
