Shangri-La Frontier

Episode 13

THIS is how you do a setup episode. Shangri-La Frontier is still building up to the central climactic moment of this arc, where Sunraku confronts the undead boss. But this episode was funny; it had a lot of foreshadowing, character-building, and subtle world-building. I liked some of the insight that we got regarding Sunraku's home life and his relationship with his friends. It turns out Sunraku's obsession with broken video games is genetic because his whole family has a bunch of weird obsessive quirks to the point where they needed to come up with a family rule to sit down and have breakfast every Sunday or they just straight up wouldn't see each other anymore. I didn't need a tangible explanation for why Sunraku was as obsessive as he was, but little moments like that helped flesh everything out. It was also used to transition into what Sunraku understands about Arthur. It was already revealed to the audience that Arthur was a famous model with much publicity around her in real life, but I didn't know if Sunraku knew that. Not only does he know, he even concludes that her real-life circumstances correlate to why she cares so much about the secret event. She probably plays online as a form of escape and sees it as a dual identity type of situation, so helping an NPC who feels like she's trapped between worlds has a lot of relatable symbolism.

Speaking of that NPC, I'll bet all the money in my pocket that she's not a program but an actual person who died and was somehow locked into the game's code. She talks about how she met an untimely death and that her former lover did something to her to put her in the state. Sunraku makes a lot of observations about the terminologies she uses and how the clothing she wears does not fully match the overall aesthetic of the game. The game goes for a fantasy medieval setting, so an NPC wearing what looks like official lab gear feels out of place. Combined with some of the earlier foreshadowing we got about NPC's relationship with this world, this fight might break the status quo. The show gives me a lot of whiplash, with some episodes just being boring while others genuinely intrigued me and reminded me why I'm keeping up with it.

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Shangri-La Frontier is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.