Gate: Thus the JSDF Fought There! – 03

This episode introduces what looks to be the main trio of girls for the cast. A elf girl, a mage girl and a Goth lolita girl with a giant axe. The Goth lolita, otherwise know as the Apostle of a death god, Rory is so far the most interesting of the bunch. Though mainly because the elf girl was unconscious for the majority of the episode and the mage girl is a bit too bland. Rory is one man killing machine with a halberd who is most certainly the type that looks younger than her age. She looks to be having fun with the army as they are oblivious to her true destructive power, she’s rather mischievous in that manner. But there’s a flaw with this episode in how Rory helped to defeat the dragon. When a rocket was shot at the dragon they seen that it would miss and in the span of time it took for the rocket to reach the dragon, Rory jumped out of the back, landed on the roof and threw her halberd faster than a rocket to hit the ground and cause the dragon to stumble. All in about three seconds at most. No matter how incredible this girl may be, that seems downright unfeasible.

Thus the army managed to defeat and drive off the giant monster. When I thought that, I took a moment to ponder just when was the last time I seen that happen. As the army man said, the JSDF has a (Fictional) history of fighting giant monsters. They do not however have a history of winning against giant monsters. Any time the army is brought out to fight some supernatural threat they have always proved to be ineffective and often obliterated. In fiction armies are often brought in to show the depth of the threat by getting destroyed so that the heroes victory is all the more impressive. The most recent example of this I have seen happened to be in the Aquaman DC animated movie when the army are brought in only to be completely useless and are saved by the heroes. So even if they got a little help from Rory. It’s nice to see the army have a win for once. The dragon used a style of CGI which was rather different, were they tried to fuse hand drawn texture with a CGI animation model. Alright, it didn’t quite work as the dragon still looked awkward but well it’s nice to see some experimentation.

What I really liked about this episode was the situation the army was in. They have the resources to easily take down a dragon but due to the delicate nature of bringing excess force too much into enemy territory it leaves them in the position of guiding refugees away from their village. They could only help out in small ways and even with that a lot of people still died. The funeral scene was really well done and from the looks of things they not have a group of people to care for. The next episode looks to be seeing how they integrate with the armies base.