Shangri-La Frontier Season 2

Episode 48

The show has some of the weirdest pacing of any show I have watched in the past year. It is difficult to review this show weekly when it feels like the narrative is flipping a coin to pick a direction. We have all of this buildup to a new tournament arc we probably won't see, because the season is wrapping up incredibly soon. Maybe we can end the series on a very big dramatic note or a cliffhanger for a potential season three? But no, let's go back to Shangri-La Frontier and fuck around with an electric shark for ten minutes. There is little to no narrative impact in this episode, and that annoyed me. The icing on the cake is that the big shark creature that we see at the end of the opening, which I thought was the mythical creature that had been building up most of the season, seems to be another random unique encounter.

It was nice getting confirmation from Oikatzo about why he was desperate and wanted to try out this makeshift team with Arthur and Sunraku. That was a genuinely nice character moment where everyone was honest with each other. Oikatzo admitted that he's never really beaten this top player, and Sunraku admits that, while their fighting styles are the same, he would still probably come up short. I'm a little confused about the jokes being done with the language barrier. I know that Sylvia isn't supposed to be Japanese, but the show is a little inconsistent about how fluently she speaks it. Maybe some of those scenes are supposed to be her speaking English, but it's in Japanese for the Japanese audience? I'm just used to shows clarifying that for me, especially when those scenes are played back-to-back.

There is something here that makes me curious for the future and that's Sylvia being interested in playing Shangri-La Frontier. They wouldn't set up the fact that this fighting game and Shangri-La Frontier use the same game engine if they weren't also teasing the introduction of more characters into Shangri-La Frontier. We are getting to a point where it's a little convenient that almost every person we meet outside of Shangri-La Frontier ends up joining the main cast, but I'm curious how we will get to that point in the story in animated form. I hope we get a season three announcement soon, because otherwise, I don't see a world where this anime ends satisfyingly at the rate that we are going.

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