Raphtalia

Every episode in this anime make feels the pain the happiness and this back story make me cry and this anime have one of the best soundtracks I ever seen.

Good solid entertainment, nothing which could be considered as great, but certainly not bad. One aspect does raise its ugly head in this episode which does affect most of the series, which is how much of a challenge does our hero have, outside the waves and the characters from another world. We know that this world was only able to fight back the 1st wave with great difficulty, yet our inexperienced hero's managed to easily fight off the 2nd wave. By the 3rd wave the difficult had reach a significantly greater level, so we can assume nothing on the world would be equal to it. Our hero managed, just, to defeat the boss, at least once, so we know he is a magnitude more powerful than anything in the world. The conclusion is there is nothing on the world which could challenge him, yet we are expected to believe he is under some threat outside the waves. On the 1st watch this issue is not obvious, but on a second watch it really presents itself as an issue. IN summery, where is the tension. This is not an issue with the story arc, or even character arcs, but is an issue with the episode arcs.

Raphtalia has been a likable character and I knew that her character's past was very complex but it was still unknown. When Naofumi bought her from the slave trader, it was visible in her eyes that she had seen things that no one should have ever seen. This episode explores her past with flashbacks as well but what I like is it isn't a complete flashback episode but a same place different time story. What I mean by that is, the story still progresses in the current timeline but things happening are very much connected to the past which develop Raphtalia's both current and previous character. She became a much more significant character in this episode and for me even she became more complex than Shield Hero, she almost became the protagonist. We know more about her than Naofumi and while Naofumi is the Shield Hero still for me Raphtalia's character is more complex and more interesting. The episode again ended on a cliffhanger which I thought was a great because this episode needed to be only about Raphtalia and gladly it was. My favorite episode so far even though it features almost no action.