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
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