86 2nd Season | Episode 4: The build up.

I didn’t think episode four was all that eventful. Something I’ve definitely noticed about 86 2nd Season is that it seems like every other episode has a lot more content than the previous. For example, I thought episode one was good, episode two not so much, then episode three was action-packed and dramatic only to then be followed up by episode four. As previously mentioned, I didn’t think episode four was all that eventful.

The only thing that I thought was remotely interesting was that we got to experience the fall of the Giad Empire verbally through Augusta Frederica Adel-Adler. Which I was okay. We learned one or two things from that scene. The first being, the knight that Augusta wants to save was part of the Nouzen family. The reason why she wants to save him was because when everyone (the people of the Empire) turned against the Imperial family, Kiriya stayed loyal and protected the family, in particular Augusta. From what is told Augusta feels responsible for his death because he was forced to protect the Imperial family, however, she also wants to save him because she viewed him as an older sibling and to a certain extent they (Kiriya and Augusta) were all they had left.

The biggest gripe I had with this scene, in particular, was that we didn’t get any visuals, or flashbacks of the moments leading up to the fall of the Giad Empire. We only got to see still images of a broken Kiriya, Augusta smiling with her arms outstretched, and her cloak on the end of the spear signalling the end of the empire. Personally, I think that’s a missed opportunity, especially since we don’t know much pertaining to how the Empire fell in the first place. We’re just told at the start of the anime “The Empire fell, we defeated the Legion” but we’re never shown how it was done or the events leading up to the eventual downfall.

Now we’re watching Shin and company go around fighting that’s left of the Legion and to me, that doesn’t seem all that fruitful. It’s kind of like everyone is roaming around aimlessly in my opinion, I guess fighting the Legion is all that’s left to do and to me, that seems pretty bland. Hopefully, the future episodes offer something different, Shin did hint that a horde of Legion is coming and everyone is preparing for that, so I hope that it’ll be action-packed and exciting.

Overall, I think episode four was one of the weaker episodes for sure. I wasn’t overly impressed with what I watched.