The big battle doesn’t start off with much of a bang
What They Say:
Osamu Mikumo is a member of Border, an organization designed to protect Mikado Citythe from alien invaders knows as Neighbors. One day a mysterious new student named Yuma Kuga transfers to his school and turns out to be a humanoid neighbor himself. The two are supposed to be natural enemies, but could there be more to neighbors than Osamu has bargained for…
The Review:
Content (warning as portions of this review may contain spoilers):
So we’ve finally arrived at the major long battle arc for World Trigger and it’s off to an…okay-ish start. Toei seemed to have mostly figured out how to direct the show a while back, and that mostly continues here, though there’s a few odd bumps. Mostly though the source material at this point takes it’s brunt of the blame too, and while these aren’t bad episodes by any means they feel a bit slower than they probably should.
A lot of it has to do with the massive amount of grandstanding that goes on here. Since it’s something of war arc, there’s a lot of back and forth dialogue about preparing for the battle ahead and though it’s not really boring or anything, it takes up a lot of both episodes and knocks the wind out of the sails a bit for the second. That’s not to say that there isn’t anything worthwhile here though.
The first of these episodes has some decent worldbuilding stuff and introduces the concept of the different countries of the Neighborhood orbiting close to and around the Earth, making it hard for Border to predict which nation is going to invading them. It sets up the possibility of exploring a larger universe in the show, but it doesn’t seem like it’ll be getting to that anytime soon.
There’s a few other interesting points from this one, the biggest being a vision Jin has about the future concerning Osamu. He knows Osamu will be in danger at some point during the upcoming battle and asks Miwa to step in and save him. Though Miwa refuses, it’s pretty clear he’ll end up stepping in anyway but it does help lend to the speculation that Jin’s scheming something involving Osamu. Exactly what is pretty hard to guess at this point, it definitely feels like he’s playing into something larger. Sadly this episode’s hampered a bit by some unnecessary recapping which kind of sucks given the show had gotten better about not doing that. It’s not enough to really hurt the episode on it’s own but it’s padded in a little too obviously.
As for the battle itself, the start of it takes up the bulk of the second of these episodes, though this one also has a little bit of excessive recapping as well at the start. Specifically Osamu recaps the last couple of episodes and it immediately follows by the narrator doing another recap about the last neighbor invasion that started off the series. It only takes up 2 minutes of the episodes runtime but it’s the first time I’ve ever seen a show do a double recap like that and it’s really jarring. Hopefully it’s the last we see of it, but it’s hard to know for sure.
Aside from that bit, a lot of the material in this one, is mainly just the aforementioned grandstanding. There is a little bit of actual battle to be had, but World Trigger’s more of a tactical warfare game than a battle shonen and things continue to play out that way here in regards to how all the action scenes are executed. Border’s preparations for the invasion seem to give them the edge at first but things take a turn south when the invaders bust out a new kind of Trion soldier called a Rabit, which specializes in capturing Trion users. Some of the impact is taken away by the fact that thanks to the whole “bail out” and Trion body system, the characters generally aren’t in any danger of actually dying but it’s still kind of creepy watching them get eaten by these things. It doesn’t look like the humanoid neighbors leading the whole assault will get introduced until next time though, so it should be fun to see what happens as far as that goes.
In Summary:
World Trigger’s first big story arc is off to a bit of a slow start. A lot of it’s due to the way a lot of the dialogue plays out, though there’s some weird recapping that hurts the material as well. It shouldn’t take too long for the battle to pick up though, and hopefully when it does it’ll make for a solid ride.
Grade: B-
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
