Chained Soldier

Episode 7

”United Front, Tenka, Soar: is one of those Chained Soldier joints that fall into the category of what I have just now, as I type this, decided to call “mishmash episodes.” Anyone who's watched enough anime based on serialized manga knows exactly the kind of episode I'm talking about. You've got the conclusion of a storyline filling up the first few minutes of the episode, and the final few minutes give us a peek at what's to come next. In between all of that? It's a mishmash. A shapeless mound of stuff that just sort of…happens so that we can get the episode to a full twenty-three minutes and nab all of that sweet, sweet advertiser money.

To be clear, there's nothing inherently terrible about mishmash episodes; they serve their function as mostly lightweight fluff that helps transition the story from one major plot beat to the next. Here, in “United Front, Tenka, Soar”, means that we wrap up the humanoid invasion with a middling action scene that sees Tenka take out the baddie with her super OP space-warping powers, which then transitions to Chained Soldier killing time with a ton of sitcom shenanigans, before closing things out with even more teases of the crew of humanoid monster-people that are plotting against our crew.

It's that first action scene that is the most disappointing part of the episode; not because it's bad, but more because the endless parade of chintzy special effect explosions is much less interesting to watch than last week's excellent wrestling throwdown. It doesn't help that the villains of this show are, at this point, hardly even characters, so it isn't like we're going to be all that invested in what goes down in these fights either way.

The sitcom-y stuff is better, since Chained Soldier has long since proven that it can function as a perfectly adequate sex comedy for people who have a half-hour to spare. The fanservice is back with a vengeance which means that Yuuki's glorious menage-a-trois reward session gets to bare its bounty of boobies unburdened by those lame lighting effect filters. The emphasis on unabashed, pervy self-indulgence also helps a few jokes to land, like the bit where poor Yuuki gets locked into a literal sleeper hold by Sahara and is nearly smothered to death by the gladiatorial strength of her nether regions. Nei's adorable manga profiles of the humanoids were also pretty darned amusing.

As for those villainous “humanoids” themselves, well, I can take or leave them. I'm moderately interested to see how Yuuki's sister plays into the whole equation, but the other bad guys and gals are just your average rogue gallery of anime weirdos. Chained Soldier will have to get extra creative in how it uses this ballooning cast of characters to get me invested. Is that likely to happen? No, but I won't complain if the show ends up surprising me.

Rating:

Chained Soldier is currently streaming on HIDIVE.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.