Isekai Quartet 2

Episode 11

Episode 11 is almost entirely occupied with setting up for the big finale next week, but that's not what viewers are likely to remember about the episode. That honor instead goes to its surprise guest appearances: Lista and Seiya from Cautious Hero: The Hero Is Overpowered but Overly Cautious. They only appear briefly towards the beginning (from the 0:50 to 1:15 mark specifically), where Lista is urging Seiya to check out the school festival, and of course he's reluctant to go because of uncertain dangers. (And in an amusing irony that's easy to miss, he turns out to actually be right this time.) Still, it's a neat touch seeing another title from Kadokawa get thrown in, even if just as a cameo.

The first season finished with a grand battle against the Destroyer as part of the cavalry event of the sports festival, but though the Destroyer has reappeared, this is not going to be a repeat of last time. After all, the class plays still have to be done, and Roswaal is not letting even the resurgence of the Destroyer interfere with them going off. Hence the episode is setting up for a two-part finish: one component will feature second-stringers from the five series (Albedo, Viktoriya, Aqua, and Emilia and Puck, with Raphtalia and Filo coming to help) facing down the Destroyer while the protagonists and other assorted characters continue on with the plays. That should make for a quite full and crazy finale.

The set-up (And in one case execution) for the plays is, of course, loaded with its own humor. Yunyun not only doing Class 3's play all by herself – with her jumping between the various roles – but also acting out The Little Match Girl specifically is a whole set of jokes until itself; what better play for a girl whose running joke is that she's always alone than a play about a girl who dies alone? Another running joke is that most of the characters portraying animals in the two plays are stuck wearing tall animal heads as hats merely sitting on top of their heads, which leads to the great camera angle shown in the screencap above. Tanya and Ains suckering Megumin into playing the fairy godmother grand wizard role that Aqua was supposed to play seems appropriate; those two have been mostly on the same wavelength since the beginning.

Of course, one of the main attractions of each episode is the jokes in the little details, and there are a plethora of them here. The Cinderella play seems to be casting Demiurge as the evil stepmother (an odd but amusing choice), while Aura and Mare are still cross-dressing themselves. In earlier scenes, Viktoriya is pigging out once again and Darkness is predictably eager to go in a haunted house apparently hosted by Overlord cast members. (I shudder to think what Ains's underlings would come up with for that.) Weiss is in trouble for taking too many samples from Beatrice's food stand, and a muscle contest features Cocytus (who doesn't have visible muscles because of his buglike form), Mare (still cross-dressing and not muscled at all) and the little-used, very buff Vooren Ganz from Saga of Tanya the Evil, whom I don't recall ever being shown as heavily-muscled in the anime version. The shooting booth has Pandora's Actor figurines as targets (a callback to a statue used for target practice in the first season). And yep, Mohawk Guy is back once again, this time selling what looks like takoyaki at a booth.

Though this season has had its weak points on balancing the contributions of its component series, this episode is one of the season's best examples of what it was accomplishing regularly in the first season. It makes for a fine set-up for the finale next week.

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Isekai Quartet 2 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.