Princess Principal Episode 3 Review

Tea for two

(This review contains spoilers!)

          For the past two weeks, Princess Principal has really wowed me with how it was able to combine beautiful animation with incredibly intelligent writing to create some of the best anime I’ve seen this year thus far. Unfortunately, this week was their first misstep, as this episode felt like something out of a pretty average show.

          Picking up where last week left off, this episode stars Ange once again, as she and Beatrice go on a mission together, while trying to earn each other’s trust. That big reveal from the end of last week? It’s explained briefly in the cold open and is never mentioned again. What relationship does Ange have with Princess? Are they sisters? Twins? Best friends? All questions that should’ve been answered but weren’t for whatever reason.

          Instead, we got an entire episode dedicated to someone who’s already proven themselves to be the Jar Jar Binks of the series: Beatrice. The whole 22 minutes is spent listening to her whine and complain about how she hates spies and loves Princess and doesn’t want her to be associated and blah-blah-blah. It doesn’t help that her voice actress screeches every line like she was in a really bad high school anime. She’s not fun to listen to, and what she’s saying isn’t very well written either. Every second she’s onscreen I want her offscreen, which isn’t great when you’re talking about a major character.

          This episode also suffers a pretty big downgrade when it comes to the animation. Gone are the warm oranges and greens of the last two episodes, replaced by boring and overused gray and teal. I don’t know if this episode was outsourced to another studio to save time or if they blew the budget on the first two, but for this show’s sake I sincerely hope it’s the first one.

          Even the spy stuff isn’t that good this week. Ange’s use of altering gravity is utilized more, and it’s a lot of fun to watch. Unfortunately besides that, nothing much exciting happens on this mission. It’s actually pretty darn uneventful when you think about it. Beatrice changing her voice is fun, but sticking a cool ability to a bad character doesn’t exactly fix them.

          I really hope that this episode was just a fluke they made to develop Beatrice’s character a bit more. The big problem here is that Beatrice’s character isn’t very fun. Plus with the awesome visuals and clever wordplay missing this week, this episode kind of feels like what Princess Principal would’ve been if not for the great showrunners.

FINAL SCORE

3/10

Bad