Guin Saga – 02

Short Synopsis: Guin, Rinda and Remus get captured by the enemies.
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Epic)
Oh, Guin Saga is promising to be another one of the gems of the current spring season. Perhaps not the best, but I just can’t ignore such an epic series that at the same time favours a very slow pacing and solid storytelling. This really is the kind of series that draws you in so far, and the choice of Satelight as the animation company really fits this sort of story.

Obviously, with the original novels currently at a staggering 124 volumes (?!), there is no way in hell that the creators are going to be able to stuff this into only 26 episodes (or however long this series might end up to be), so I wonder how the creators are going to plan to end this thing, but that shouldn’t be that big of a deal.

The problems with this show of course are of course that when you start objectively looking past the haunting dialogue, great atmosphere, terrific music and solid graphics, there isn’t that much new: the creators specifically chose this slow pacing and simple setting as a base, and from this they’ll probably slowly develop the rest of the setting. I’m interested in what kind of character-development this series seems to be going for as well: here we have Guin and Rinda, who are already very stable characters without much flaws in their personality that they need to overcome. Instead, Guin’s flaw is his amnesia and the fact that nearly everyone sees him as a monster, while Rinda’s problem is that she’s a grown up stuck into a child’s body that nobody’s going to listen to, now that she lost her status as a princess.

And then there is of course the evil overlord that makes his presence in this episode, who probably is my least favourite character of the show. The guy really needs to be fleshed out, get some development, or have something happen to him to make him more than your average sadistic bad guy. But then again, it’s only been two episodes. There’s plenty of time left for that.