Are these people meant to be a recurring cast?
Impressions:
This episode kind of lost control of its script too, but it at least accelerated into nonsense as the episode went on. The first five minutes or so were a dry history lesson on the setting for children. Quite literally. There were a couple kids that they gave a history lesson to while going over each individual person on the bus. Eventually, some random bandits showed up and everybody sprang into action as one to fight them off, which is a weirdly rare act of camaraderie in anime. A little dry, but nothing too chaotic here, and Rouge continues to at least be an amusing character in her reactions and quips, even the flat awful jokes.
But then they crash into a forest… in the middle of a desert… which somehow loses the bandits, and stumble upon some ancient war machines that the dumbass children start poking until it goes berserk and provides a random monster for them to fight, but not before the mercenaries show up just to get instantly vaporized by it while everybody on the bus a couple hundred feet away sits there in confusion and ignorance about the half dozen tanks blowing up and the fifty foot giant robot stomping around. Also, there was some random dude there who’s never introduced. I thought maybe it was the bus driver with some bad direction and taking off his hat confusing me, but… no. It’s just… some random dude that was I guess having a picnic while sitting on the local elite encounter of the region, completely unexplained that they kept pointing out. Meanwhile, the businessdude and the photographer just… evaporated once the boss battle and weird music started. I had to go back on that too, but… again, no. They’re commenting on things while the dude is watching kids poke death machines.
It makes it very hard to tell how seriously we’re supposed to be taking any of this, but after the last two episodes, at least it was a complete, confined episode, even if it felt very much like filler only two episodes in.
