I'm Standing on 1,000,000 Lives.

Episode 10

Nothing has come particularly easy for Yusuke and the girls in dealing with the quests from Game Master, so why should a seemingly-simple task like just exploring another 5% of the map be any different? They had a good plan – split off in four directions to cover more ground – and it should have worked, and nearly does. However, the best-laid plans are always subject to the vagaries of weather, and that is the new and frustrating complication that arises here. What better to bog down a trek through mountainous terrain than a freak blizzard?

I am a bit curious as to what kind of “somewhat unique climate” the land around Randobardo has where blizzards can just pop up like that, but whatever. That just means that the contrivance is in the climate rather than in the story coming up with some other way for all four heroes to simultaneously be put in mortal peril. They were not expecting such a turn in the weather, so they did not have the proper equipment for it. And there's nothing like unrelenting chill to sap away even the strong will to continue. Letting the blizzard do all of the work would be a little dull, so we get the obligatory fight with a one-eyed yeti-type critter. That leads to the obligatory moral quandary about how killing the yeti dooms its young, but Yusuke has little inclination to have pity – his life was on the line, after all, and remained so afterward – so it is a much lighter moral dilemma than the ones he faced in dealing with the Doekk soldiers.

Since I am not familiar with the source material, I am presuming that the episode was stretching itself out so that it could end on that cliffhanger, because my, did it seem to be relentlessly killing time! Sure, all of the flashbacks add a certain degree of context to the mental state of each character, and I believe that that there are some new scenes in among those flashbacks, but the writing and direction is also pulling out just about every trick in the book to make sure that nearly everything going on takes a little longer than it has to. Did we really need the montage of the various locales around town showing the snow starting to fall? This has never been a slow-paced series, so I guess they had to draw things out somewhere to achieve a proper stopping point at the end of the season, and this is that “somewhere.” Still, at least some effort was put into building the atmosphere for this turn of events, and the production merits are not bad.

Aside from the yeti fight, the one other part which did not feel stretched was Kahvel reminiscing about Yusuke. Giving her time to get her emotions straight after saying her farewell to Yusuke was entirely appropriate, as while she may not be in love, Yusuke has certainly made an impression on her. If this is the last time we see her then I am sad to see her go, as she had been a great character.

The closer also deserves mention this time. Rather than the normal animation, it shows live-action footage of singer Liyuu frolicking in several inches of snow while wearing what she later reveals is a reversible series jacket. (The inside makes one look like the Game Master.) I am very curious about when this was filmed, since winter is just approaching as this episode airs, but it's a fitting gimmick given the content of the episode.

So is this a quest fail we're looking at, or did Yusuke fall just far enough to cover the remaining .007%? Guess we'll see next episode.

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I'm Standing on 1,000,000 Lives. is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.