Rail Wars!

Episode 9

Credit where it's due: Rail Wars! had some genuinely charming moments in this episode, a few diamonds of happiness amidst its regularly scheduled dunes of drollery. It was only a minute or two of glee all together, but I'll take it. When last we left the trainees of squad J4, they were pedaling an ancient train-car downhill over rusty rails and through breakneck tunnels in the mountain countryside to get an organ to its dying recipient on time. This is the kind of work you can expect when you apply for a job with JNR security! (Spoilers: it is not.) Most of the episode is taken up with frantic shared explanations between characters on how to operate a broken-down machine like this, what the fail-safes might be, what break fade is, how to take curves, etc., and that stuff is as boring as it's always been. I sorely wished one of their lengthy factoid dumps would be interrupted by a toppled tree on the track, and much to my surprise, unexpected danger did crop up and the exposition segments were cut shorter in this episode than normal. I guess it's hard to wax pedantic about trains when you're barreling down a mountain at 70 MPH. (I'm sorry if that velocity is inaccurate. My brain tends to clock out when they're detailing that stuff, as I've covered above.)

Thanks to the real-time urgency of the situation, Rail Wars! refrains from talking our ears off so much and there's some fun action in its place. When the brakes give out near the end of their grueling ride, all four members of J4 are forced to scramble to the side of the train, flinging their body weight as hard as they can in the right direction to keep the train from derailing on curves. Aoi encourages Takayama to scream whatever's in his heart so he can pull back harder on the train as they plummet forward. Takayama shouts "I'M GONNA BE A TRAIN ENGINEER" because that's his only personality trait, but it made me laugh, as did Iwaizumi's attempt to stop the train by leaping out the back and hot-footing the rusty rails. (Wouldn't that have killed him?! No kidding this is fantasy!) It's incredibly stupid, and the execution is a little limp due to budget limitations, but at least this episode was something approaching a fun time. Of course, the entire ride down is interrupted by multiple cleavage-in-face topplings and capped with a dramatic "I once lost someone I cared about to an undelivered organ transplant" soliloquy from Haruka, dropped on us with no foreshadowing or successful weight.

Lameness aside, this was the most fun episode of Rail Wars! by a wide margin. Much like that pedal-train, the animation was barely holding on throughout the episode (there's some wacky chameleon-eyes on characters throughout,) and there wasn't exactly anything good about it, but if Rail Wars! can increase the lack of boredom in its week-to-week, there may be a little hope for it yet.

Rating: C-

Rail Wars! is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Hope has been an anime fan since childhood, and likes to chat about cartoons, pop culture, and visual novel dev on Twitter.