Going up
(This review contains
spoilers!)
Girls’
Last Tour is such a delightful enigma. This episode continues to subvert
anime expectations, as we explore another trope of apocalypse storylines and
turn it into another cute, fun and happy adventure through the wasteland.
Continuing off from last week, the
girls are continuing on their merry way to the tower they spotted, trying to
get to a higher level of this mysterious city. Along the way, they meet a new
character: a map-maker known as Kanazawa. He helps them reach the tower, but as
they climb upwards in the elevator things start to get interesting.
One thing I’d like to point out is how
Kanazawa’s character seems like a reversal of the typical one-off character you’d
see in an apocalypse show. Usually, if our heroes come across some random guy
in one episode who looks like he’s going to help them, the episode ends with
him turning on them and things getting worse for both of them. Given the
overall kind themes of this show, we get nothing of the sort from Kanazawa.
While he’s not someone I think I’d like to stick around for more than another
episode or two, having an extra companion along for the ride was fun.
The entire sequence on the elevator
and the immediate aftermath is some amazing storytelling. The entire episode is
built around a single question: “What makes life worth living?” For Kanazawa,
the answer is his maps. But as the rickety elevator taking them up to the next
floor begins to shake, his maps fall out as a result. For Kanazawa, he thinks
he might as well follow them out of the elevator window, but Chi and Yuu force
him to go up with them. Yuu then gives the answer to the question: life doesn’t
need to have a reason to be worth living. It’s a delightful ending to an
excellent episode.
The one gripe I have is that the
ending seemed a little rushed. Granted, they covered the moral excellently, but
I would’ve liked to see how they fixed the elevator after getting stuck. The
scene in between the maps falling out and them at the top of the tower is
framed kind of weird. It basically goes “Boy, I hope we can fix the elevator.” followed
by a cut to them at the top and saying “I’m sure glad we fixed that elevator!”
It’s a little weird, but if we had to skip it to get the great ending it was
all worth it.
There was a little bit more lore
sprinkled in this week too. Kanazawa said the elevator is hundreds of years
old, which again poses the question: how long have Chi and Yuu been around for?
The art style makes it kind of hard to tell exactly how old they are. I really
want to learn their full backstories as well as how this world came to be.
This was another fantastic episode of Girls’ Last Tour. Adding in a third
character to push home the existential question posed in the first minute of
the episode was brilliant, as was the way that question was answered. His
interactions with Chi and Yuu were a lot of fun as well. While we might not see
Kanazawa again, he was a great one-time addition.
FINAL SCORE
9/10
Amazing
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