ENDRO!

Episode 3

One element I really appreciate about ENDRO is how it deploys its RPG elements. So many other anime set in fantasy realms will give their characters literal stats and levels with experience points and such. Conversely, this week's episode of ENDRO deals with the girls taking on quests as part of their adventure schooling. These are literal tutorial quests, and they even comment on the banal expectations you would have of such things as if you encountered them in a game. But that element is simply evident to us as audience members, with the characters still regarding it from a purely in-universe perspective. The joke works because they trust us to get it—there isn't any obnoxious winking and nudging about how this reference works.

Anyway, that tutorial-questing for the team makes up the entire focus of this episode, with the girls spotlighted so specifically that Mao doesn't even appear in this one! Portions of this setup are here to provide the opportunity for commentary on the nature of early quests as well as what fantasy-land adventurers do in general. Anyone who's played an RPG have bemoaned the prevalence of fetch-quests; the party realizes that going to get things is the primary action their chosen profession boils down to, since the word ‘quest’ literally means to search for something. In this case, they're looking for cats. Lots and lots of cats.

Sometimes a big running gag in a show like this can turn out obnoxious, but ENDRO knows how to get the most out of a good thing. At first, their feline-finding charge makes for a great little anti-climax, then when it repeats they escalate it well beyond absurdity, with Yusha drawing five additional kitty quests. It leads into a strongly entertaining mid-episode discussion of them embracing their newfound roles as cat-catchers, how they could find the work fulfilling and even use those skills to defeat a Demon Lord. By the time they marched up to the Guild the third time, fully expecting another cat quest, the development had already won me over on the episode. The show took a relatively simple running gag and turned it into a way to explore character development, as the girls really do grow through this simple repetitive task.

And then all the cat-catching comes around in a sweet way for the rest of the episode. After finally getting a ‘real’ quest to obtain some fancy item from a distant place, the team ends up deciding to instead help a distraught local little girl find her lost cat. I could see where this was going immediately, but that didn't matter because I was too busy having my heartstrings being pulled by how they reached their decision. It feeds into the long-term ideas of the show quite well, as Seira points out that ‘a hero is someone who helps people in need’, and sometimes that need is to find a lost cat.

This episode shows a strong knack for setting up elements to be paid off later. A spider monster the team easily dispatches while discussing cat-finding strategies ends up being a dry run for the boss battle at the end of the episode. A gag about Seira accidentally packing a bow for the trip pays off as a way to cut the webbed-up cat loose once they find it. I don't want to over-sell ENDRO as being more deep or dense than it is, but between the tightly-written plot and the way basic setups are used to develop the cast and ruminate on fantasy situations, it's clearly not content to be mere fluffy frivolity—a series can be fun and relaxing and still smart. Not all the jokes work, like Mei's recurring Cartado fixation or Fai's simplistically grating food-focus. But those can be ignored in favor of all the good stuff this week. And hey, the show proving it can work well without Mao is a good sign as well.

Rating: A-

ENDRO! is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.