Wednesday 28 April 2010

Senkou no Night Raid - Episode 3

After seeing him first mentioned last episode, this third instalment of Senkou no Night Raid sees Yukina seemingly contacted via letter by her brother, who gives her a time and a place to meet, and thus setting off a chain of actions which sends the series in rather a different direction.


With doubts as to the veracity of the letter in question, Yukina instead goes shopping for a new fountain pen at one of the four major department stores in Shanghai - Just in time to see one of them, still under construction, go up in flames as part of a terrorist bomb plot. News soon filters through that there are three more devices, each located in a different store, and primed to go off at different times, meaning that our group of special individuals are soon called into action to stop any further damage being done.

As if hunting down bombs wasn't a difficult enough task, it appears that they aren't the only espers in town as they soon come across an individual who can more than match their own abilities, which makes life decidedly more dangerous as the ties between this incident and Yukina's brother come to the fore in a manner that will doubtless set the tone for the rest of the series.

After that rather slow and austere second episode, this instalment of Senkou no Night Raid was certainly closer to what I was expecting from the series, and it's also introduced some decidedly interesting plot twists by equipping other factions with espers and tying them to the group we've been following via Yukina and her brother - Some juicy plot progression that added to an already half-decent episode that exhibited a far more engrossing self-contained plot in its own right. If I have a gripe about this show, it's how convenient all of these superpowers seem to be - Despite their limitations, the group always seem to have just the right blend of abilities to handle any task without getting their hands too dirty, which does tend to remove some of the dramatic tension. I suppose setting espers against other espers remedies that to some degree (it certainly helped ramp up the excitement on this occasion), but it still holds the danger of making otherwise complex missions a little too simple at times.

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