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Yuki Yuna is a Hero: The Great Mankai Chapter
Episode 10

by Christopher Farris,

How would you rate episode 10 of
Yuki Yuna is a Hero: The Great Mankai Chapter ?
Community score: 4.4

The parallel pacing of The Great Mankai Chapter has finally fully caught up with the previous narrative we had for Yuki Yuna. There's only so much show left now, so this week's entry is effectively a 'B-Side' story to what we saw happening in the finale to Hero Chapter. The focus is still technically on Mebuki and the Sentinels, but that intersecting context we got with Karin last week carries through, clarifying what some of what we saw in that Season 2 finale was (or at least retconning some of the light-show from the big final JRPG boss battle to attribute it to that team). This still isn't actually the final episode of The Great Mankai Chapter, but even just as a climax it's easy to accuse it of playing on Easy Mode by exploiting its proximity to that previous reality-blasting finish. But if Yuki Yuna knows anything, it's spectacle.

One point of this portion of the story is the understanding that the audience already knows things work out for the world overall in the end. Thus, fitting with the theme of the Sentinels being more background elements, 'Unsung Heroes' if you will, this focus shifts more to the people, the girls, and their moments with each other. This manifests in small ways, like Suzume's regular panicked little reactions to the seven layers of holy hell being blown up around everyone. That can come off a bit overused, especially with the technical gravitas we know this story entails, but it seems to ride that aforementioned knowledge of how things work out to make us a bit more receptive to them. Or does it? The Sentinels' part of this episode wraps on a nebulous note of how well they survived their effort at a big finish, but I have to presume that the show wouldn't bring them all this way, have them make the declarations and developments they do here, simply to wipe them all out before the series is even done.

Because the more serious elements of human connection between the new characters is effectively framed as the turning point here. Mebuki is finally able to fight her way in to save Aya and encourage her to live not because it's a mission from the Gods, but because it's specifically what she wants for herself. Similarly, Aya's resolution forms a neat parallel with the desperate wish not to leave her friends we know Yuna reached in the original version of this finale. There's a neat point of comparison that converges with the connection between the likes of Mebuki and Karin that was followed up on last week: The end of the Hero Chapter seemed to indicate that Yuna and the Heroes had reached an understanding of choice with the Gods, simply finding another way while those believers who wished to ascend did so. The Great Mankai Chapter, on the other hand, comes off much more angry in its invocation of the Divine Tree's will. Mebuki herself, along with additional tones afforded from her for the Heroes, directly asserts the narrative that the Gods were out-of-touch, manipulative jerks. It plays well following on from the point she made to Karin last week: You can't just wish that everything will work out in the end, you must take direct action to ensure that. As then, it feels like an (appreciated!) attempt to retroactively assign some of the success of Hero Chapter's final reset button to the agency of the Heroes, to say nothing of our new friends the Sentinels.

There is, however, a significant caveat to my appreciation for how this episode lines everything up: It's not a fully-new episode. The previously-unseen context angle would naturally ensure that some references to the second season's ending should pop up, but by my estimation, this episode of The Great Mankai Chapter is roughly half footage from that finale by volume. I am torn on this, since I thought the last episode of Hero Chapter was handily the best part of it anyway, and I don't necessarily mind watching all those fireworks going off again. But it does feel just a bit cheap after coming all this way to have huge swaths of the run-time ripped directly from an episode from four years ago, seemingly simply to fill up space. It creates an ironic sense that the Sentinels still aren't allowed to be the main characters of their own story, cutting over to the Heroes as this one constantly does, not really even rounding back to advance Mebuki and Aya's resolution until the second half of the episode. There is one new major piece of animation added concerning the Heroes' battles, appropriately focused on Karin's (and Nogi's) clarified resolution to ultimately upend the oppressive system of the Gods. And that works given that already-established connection from earlier parts of this episode (plus it's suitably an incredibly epic moment). But then the show just continues throwing me off from what should be the main focal characters of this section, cutting away from the seeming heroic sacrifice of Mebuki and the others to show us reruns of Fu and Togo's part of the original part of the episode.

One irony of this is that I think I actually like the way this version of the finale is paced out better compared to the one from 2018. The new character presence and focus on what the Shinkon really entails for the Miko and other Taisha-adjacent characters adds layers to the goings-on, exemplified in the way this one actually ends only halfway through the original version of the story we saw. As with the other elements that The Great Mankai Chapter has inserted along the arc of the Hero Chapter, I think it does bring the enjoyment of the content up comparatively. And once this is all wrapped, I wouldn't mind figuring out some sort of optimal watch order to make all these elements slot together in the effective way they're arranged for. But as-is, this one comes up just a bit short for feeling like a satisfying partially-new story saddled with an (admittedly cool to watch) clip show.

Rating:

Yuki Yuna is a Hero: The Great Mankai Chapter is currently streaming on HIDIVE.

Chris is a freelance writer who appreciates anime, action figures, and additional ancillary artistry. He can be found staying up way too late posting screencaps on his Twitter.


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