Shangri-La Frontier Season 2
Episode 41
by MrAJCosplay,
How would you rate episode 41 of
Shangri-La Frontier (TV 2) ?
Community score: 3.9

It's been a while since we checked in with Arthur and Oikatzo. This might be the first time we've had an episode that focuses on them completely without our main character. I would've liked something like this much sooner, but I can also understand why we had an episode like this, given the impetus for why Arthur and Oikatzo are having these moments of character introspection. I'm a little shocked that it has only been a few days since the defeat of Wethermon, which could be a testament to the show leaning into the fact that these characters are having absurdly long play sessions. I would've figured at least a week or two had passed between now and then. That means there have been two major story developments for Shangri-La Frontier in a short period.
There was a lot of buildup and foreshadowing about the game's story structure changing because a major game character was beaten way earlier than they were supposed to be, but we don't get a proper follow-up to that in this episode. Cutting to the game devs felt like an excuse to reuse a previous joke. The only real thing of note that we get is that AI for Lycagon was fine-tuned during the fight, which could maybe be considered cheating, but it doesn't matter considering that Sunraku and his team still won the fight anyway, so I'm not sure what that scene was there for.
The Wethermon fight didn't just have an impact on the game itself, it had an impact on Arthur and Oikatzo. It arguably had more of an emotional impact on them than it did on Sunraku. We already knew that Arthur put a lot of emotional investment into that boss fight due to her sense of personal connection with the NPC that initiated the encounter. Arthur being listless is almost like she's trying to recover why she wants to keep playing. Still, I think Arthur enjoys being a little troll and running around this world more than she lets on. We've all had that moment playing a game where we may beat the story and wonder if it's worth exploring the rest of the world.
Oikatzo, on the other hand, has more prideful reasons to keep playing. He only got interested in Shangri-La Frontier because it uses a similar game engine to another fighting game he's expected to play as a real-world, competitive gamer. While taking down Wethermon was a group effort, he feels like he's lagging because he wasn't the one to dish out the final blow and he had to suffer a major penalty at the cost of losing a bunch of his levels. I'm sure he would be angry to find out that Sunraku is now level ninety-nine when he is struggling to get back to his previous level cap around the fifties. I'm surprised that this show more or less avoided a lot of shonen tropes, like the typical shonen rivalry.
Overall, this wasn't a bad episode, it just felt like it dragged on a bit longer than it should have. The show's pacing has never been great and maybe I've just been spoiled by the fact that almost every episode has had some degree of action to it, which was significantly lacking here. I also wonder if this episode is here to foreshadow Arthur and Oikatzo's inclusion in the upcoming arc. They are featured prominently in the opening and ending sequences. I don't know if they even realize what Sunraku is up to so getting them involved would feel a little bit out of place unless the show finds a way to justify that.
Rating:
AJ also streams regularly on Twitch as the indie Vtuber Bolts The Mechanic where they talk about and play retro media!
Shangri-La Frontier is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.
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