Well, I hope you like your morals, because this episode was full of them: “thou shalt not kill”, “killing is necessary”, “pointless murders are pointless”, “people I don’t like are better off dead”. What was supposed to have been a climactic battle ended up in all of the characters throwing these morals back and forth at each other.
While I do have my issues with this episode, it wasn’t bad by far. Instead, it was average for this series’ standards: nowhere near its best, but also far from the tedious watch that some of its other episodes were. Still, this episode did go on and on with these morals, but considering their use, they accomplished very little. This episode was meant to close off the kid arc, so you’d expect some sort of conclusion, or new twist or anything, but we already knew pretty much all of the moral slogans that the characters said here. In the end, it was mere build-up.
The biggest changes in this episode involved that boy. His parents have been slaughtered, he wakes up, cries for a minute, and after that he’s fine again. Perhaps a bit of a fast development, but it works. I liked how he actually partially took part in taking out the pink-haired couple. He progressed a lot through this arc, and even though I wonder what his point was in the overall story, this episode did give his character adequate closure, and the upcoming arcs should prove to be quite interesting after all that build-up. If it’s used well, of course.
On a side-note: this is a pretty minor issue, but it did bother me in this episode: I’m a bit confused about the concepts of space in this series: how big are these countries? How many people live in these countries? How big are their armies? How long does it take to travel from one place to the other? These were some questions that sparked my mind when suddenly Miran appeared from out of nowhere at exactly the right moment. In fact, the way that this guy keeps sticking his nose in just about every part of Shion’s plans may be a bit much.
Rating: * (Good)
Those are questions that should be answered in any serious fantasy novel but I’m not certain if this applies to DYD light novels, which so far give off the feeling of being a bit too light on the consistency logic. I do know that teleportation exists in DYD, but I’m not sure whether or not Miran can teleport.
Check this site to see the map and characters location per episode.
http://www.denyuden.jp/story/map.html
I think you missed a few things here.
Firstly, Miran did not appear out of nowhere, he was there all along waiting for the right moment. He said it, that he was listening to there conversation and that’s how he knew that Ryner and Ferris were from Roland.
Secondly, Miran was in Runa last episode and so were Ryner and Ferris. Now I don’t know how big a country Runa is since I haven’t checked the map, but I suppose there was enough time for him to get there in the time Arua was training.
The way some characters can just travel all over the place and rapidly move between different countries almost feels like they have teleportation powers. Or maybe the countries are really not that big. Roland seems like it might be just one major city.
Ah, so that’s what the map looked like. I kind of figured Gastark and Roland were polar opposites, given the way the characters talked about them and how it’s taken Gastark the longest to get to Roland.