Sakuna: Of Rice And Ruin

Episode 12

With how much last week's episode was setting things up for a finale, I was pretty sure the show was wrapping up this week, but it seems like we still have one more episode to go. However, rather than ramping things up further, the show ends up dialing things back a bit to shed some spotlight on Tama as he forces Sakuna into making a difficult choice to defeat Omizuchi. It's a bit of an odd choice for a penultimate episode, and while it's pretty solid, it feels like enough of a detour to kill the momentum.

As Sakuna prepares for her battle with Omizuchi, she runs into a problem: mainly that she has no real way of hurting him since his scales are impervious to nearly any kind of blade. The only real chance she has is to use the same sword that her dad used to defeat him in the past, so Tama offers to be forged into a new weapon to give her a fighting chance. Unfortunately, this also means that Tama's soul would be lost forever, so Sakuna adamantly refuses to go through with it until Tama points out that continuing to be stubborn about this could put the entire island at risk. Sakuna eventually gives in to letting Tama go through with it, but resolves to spend a bit more time with him before the end. But before she can, Tama asks the others to go ahead with the forging to spare her the pain of having to say goodbye, and with her new weapon in tow, Sakuna is ready to defeat Omizuchi once and for all.

I wasn't invested in this one. Partially because I came into this expecting we were on the final episode, but also because I haven't been all that endeared to Tama as a character. While this sacrifice works to help move the story along, it didn't get its hooks into me emotionally. This isn't to say that it completely failed at that, since I did feel like the episode did at least manage to communicate how this old little magic dog has been the closest thing Sakuna has had to a parent, and it was nice to hear the rice planting song again. Even if it didn't exactly leave me feeling devastated, I can't say that using it as Tama's final sendoff wasn't a sweet scene, and it did manage to tug at my heartstrings a bit. Still, I'm not quite sure if all this was worth spending the entire episode. Even with how relaxed of a show this has been in general, it felt pretty weird to spend its time this late in the game. Luckily, while things did slow down, it wasn't to the point of giving me any real concerns about where it was going. I can't say I'm excited for the finale, but I'm still on board to see how it all wraps up.

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Sakuna: Of Rice And Ruin is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.