I’ll be honest, I kind of forgot what had happened in last week’s Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? III. I think it’s because I was still a bit miffed about episode 8. I did not like that episode. But it actually turned out pretty good.
Maybe it’s just because I’m on a high from having finished all my Christmas shopping already. Christmas is in exactly 3 weeks! Can you believe it? Time sure has flown. How about you Crow? Are you still scrambling for presents? How was your week? Oh, guys, Crow from Crow’s World of Anime will be joining me once again this week and his solid dependable classic font. Also, we’re probably going to spoil stuff but this wasn’t really the type of episode you can spoil.
Got most of my Christmas shopping done, shockingly! But you’re right. Time really has flown. Hard to believe it’s December! Heck, I was just thinking about a meeting in December 1999 as final preparation for the year 2000. I was certain we’d gotten all the Y2K bugs worked out of the system. Ah, good times. Good times.
So if you also forgot what happened last week, basically everyone calmed down and now Bell & Co need to find a way to sneak the Xenos back into the dungeon before Ais just slaughters them all and laughs over their bones! Ok maybe that won’t happen, but it could. And that’s reason enough to try to avoid the Loki familia right now.
The plan is pretty straight forward. Welf and Mikoto will accompany the Xenos to the nearest unguarded Labyrinth door while the rest of the team either create chaos and diversions, get some intel or coordonate from an appropriate distance. You can guess what Hestia is going to do.
On the up side they do still have Fels and his wonderful magical items. Have you noticed that most magic is essentially smartphones?
Round, non-ergonomic smartphones! I didn’t see a silence button on them, either. In fact, Hestia just calling out for Bell almost drew attention from unwanted eyes!
Now, what would have been even more useful would be floating audio/visual orbs. Let ‘em loose throughout the city, and you have a great surveillance net! Then you wouldn’t need to rely on people talking into marbles for intelligence!
The entire episode was a pleasant enough game of cat and mouse between the Hestia and Loki familias. I was happy that they gave Lili such an important role and she pulled it off beautifully. I’m guessing there are only one of those shapeshifting thingamabobs and that’s why they didn’t just switch all the Xenos to humans. Still, they could have had them walk across town as humans one at a time until they were all safe. Oh well…
It really was nice to see Lili in action. She really put her life on the line to imitate an al-miraj. She nearly got her cute tail burned off! Then she did a great impression of Finn to order his people out of position.
Before playing her part, she seemed really, really scared. I thought it was great how she worked up her courage and upheld her part of the operation.
You raised a good point, too. Bell, Welf, and Mikoto all had invisibility magic. Though Ais almost found Bell anyway using the Bell-DAR sense, using similar magic on the other Xenos would have been really useful!
So things are looking ok for the most part. Lili manages to disrupt the enemy forces and figure out which doors have not yet been discovered. I’m not entirely sure what Bell is doing but it seems to be going according to plan. It was sweet to see all those girls coming to help Bell. I assume Hestia will have something to say about it when this is all over. And best of all, the main Xenos group seems to have gotten away.
Ais almost had something to say! She seemed both bemused and border-line jealous, though I’m not sure she’s capable of that. The running joke of first Naaza visiting him, then Aisha and Ryuu, and finally Eina, worked well.
I actually wondered, as I watched those scenes, if you’d remember much about them because Ais figured so prominently. She’s magically enchanted to make you lose interest, isn’t she?
Speaking of Eina, I was really looking forward to her chewing Bell out for leaving her hanging at the end of episode 8. Gotta admit to feeling disappointed the conversation didn’t happen.
I also wonder about Hermes’ bracelet. He gave her one and said she should give it to Bell, but after he’d left, she found she couldn’t take it off her wrist. I wonder what part it’ll play later, if any?
If nothing, I think Chekhov’s gun might be a bit miffed.
Of course, we still have 2 episodes to go so things can’t be that easy. There are still isolated Xenos all over town, including the Black minotaur, that is going to need some saving. And Weine got separated from the main group just mere meters from the door to Knossos and is now going in the wrong direction.
Kids, you can’t take your eyes off them!
Am I the only one who thought of Baby Plucky when Wiene “went down the hole?”
I am, aren’t I?
This would have been ok. Weine fell into some tunnels so she’s fairly safe and Haruhime went after her except, of course, Wiene had to come out right in front of Tiona. At this point, the poor little wyvern looks so small and pathetic it’s difficult to imagine anyone would take her for a threat. Then again half the town went crazy trying to kill a withe rabbit earlier so I guess it’s not that much of a stretch.
Tiona is the most adorable main battle tank I’ve ever seen. I like her character quite a bit. In this case, I liked how she didn’t seem that enthusiastic about slaughtering Wiene.
Though that didn’t exactly stop her, did it?
All in all it was a fun episode and for me it flew by. Nothing much to say and not too deep but pleasant enough. At this point, I’ll take it!
Definite improvement over episode 8! And now I’m dying to see the conversation between Bell and Eina!
- Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? III Episode 1 – Dungeons and Wyverns
- Is It Wrong To Try To Pick Up Girls In A Dungeon? III Episode 2: Coexistence And Lili’s Foot In Mouth Disease
- Is It Wrong To Try To Pick Up Girls In A Dungeon? III Episode 3 – The Mission To Level 20
- Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? III Episode 4 – Told You He Was A Dix
- Is It Wrong To Try To Pick Up Girls In A Dungeon? III Episode 5: Gros Isn’t Wrong
- Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? III Episode 6 – A Man Named Modaka
- Is It Wrong To Try To Pick Up Girls In A Dungeon? III Episode 7: Bell Takes On Wiene And The World
- Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? III Episode 8 – An Enemy of Humanity
- Is It Wrong To Try To Pick Up Girls In A Dungeon? III Episode 9: Regrets And Introspection
Shapeshifter Lily was great, and I thought the Ais-watches-Bell scene was a great harem-meta-joke, but I’m getting tired of how the show keeps damselling Wiene. At this point its a serial joke more than anything. Would be great if next episode she just sits there cowering and crying, and we get a repeat of episode 1, this time with Tione instead of Bell. Would make things interesting, though it would also make Bell less special, because everyone else apparently wouldn’t have second thoughts about slaughtering a crying and cowering creature. Yeah, I wish they’d handle that part a little better. (Uniform crowd behaviour is one thing I’ve never liked in any fiction, but it’s almost everywhere – Danmachi is hardly special here.)
All in all, I enjoyed the episode. Why is it so much easier to talk about your niggles than about what you liked? Is it because language and maybe attention is basically a problem-solving mechanism? I’m always sounding so negative about this show, when I actually really like it (or I wouldn’t still be hear near the end of season 3).
Well Weine is a cute little baby girl… I have little hope for her ever being anything else but since I decided she was a small child for some reason I guess I can accept that she needs constant saving.