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Nanbaka
Episode 4

by Rose Bridges,

How would you rate episode 4 of
Nanbaka ?
Community score: 4.2

It's episode 4 of Nanbaka and time for the New Year's tournament! Every year, Nanba prison holds a contest between the different buildings, with events based on traditional Japanese arts and games. Both guards and inmates can compete to win the honor of getting to improve their prison in the way they see fit. This creates the perfect opportunity for Building 13's band of weirdos to show off their skills—if they have any relevant ones.

The New Year's tournament provides a great opportunity to get to know some of the other guards and inmates. We've seen some of the guards in earlier episodes at staff meetings, but they've barely had a chance to showcase their personalities. The only memorable one is the flamboyant Kiji. He gets little exposure until the end of the episode. Instead, we see the Building 13 gang's interactions with the other guards and inmates.

Of these, the most interesting relationship is between Rock and Liang, a Chinese prisoner who becomes his opponent in the second contest. The first contest, focusing on Japanese calligraphy, goes by quickly. Jyugo, the only Japanese guy among them, is an awful calligrapher, but it turns out both of their guards are experts who teach it, so Building 13 easily wins the round. The real meat of the episode is in the next two contests, starting with the oddly aggressive mochi competition.

The contest involves two players, one inmate and one guard. One pounds the mochi, while the other defends their daruma and attacks the other team's. Rock promises just to defend their daruma, but Liang comes out of nowhere to pound one disc away from their platform. It turns out he's so aggressive because he and Rock used to fight when they were in the same building, and Rock last left him with a serious pounding. Liang has dedicated himself to combat training and wants to create a training field if his building wins the contest. He doesn't last long, though; Rock regains his strength and sends Liang flying. The Building 13 guard also hits his opponent through his own platform, winning the round. I would have liked to learn more about Rock and Liang's history, but I wasn't expecting much. As the other characters note during the intense battle sequence, Nanbaka is still a gag anime.

What was most interesting about this episode was the way that it played around with the show's format. Nanbaka is normally the sort of jumping-from-joke-to-joke series you would expect to be a short anime. In fact, the previous episodes often left me wondering why it wasn't exactly that. With episode 4, it embraces its full length with a larger story that even continues into the next episode. It's still all about the gags, but Nanbaka expands its repertoire by reaching into other genres like battle tournament shows. I hope that the series continues to play around with its formula like this going forward. Nanbaka can easily stumble into repetitive jokes, as it did for the first three episodes, but this new direction finally shows more promise.

The final section of the tournament involves a Japanese poem-identification card game called karuta, where players must beat their opponent in identifying a poem and swiping its card, based on its opening lines being read aloud by a moderator. Seitarou turns out to be a genius at the game and easily wins for the guards, but Uno is at a disadvantage, since he likely cannot read hiragana. He has a trick up his sleeve that we'll get to see next episode though. This week actually left me in suspense, a feeling I never thought I'd get from Nanbaka.

Rating: B

Nanbaka is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Rose is a music Ph.D. student who loves overanalyzing anime soundtracks. Follow her on her media blog Rose's Turn, and on Twitter.


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