Overlord III

Episode 8

If it's possible for a story to be gently harsh, then this episode accomplishes that mood, making its title, “A Handful of Hope”, one of the season's biggest teases.

There's nothing all that brutal about what we're actually shown in the episode; in terms of graphic violence, this episode is pretty tame. One character was even done in with plenty of sorrow and fear but a minimum of suffering. The fate that awaits the one surviving adventurer at the end isn't pretty, but once again, it's insinuated rather than shown.

However, that doesn't stop this from being an especially chilling episode. We all knew that Foresight had no hope of standing up to Ains, but I actually thought they might be able to talk their way out of the situation, especially given that Ains was holding back against them. Alas, their appeal to his adventuring side couldn't get past how pissed off he was at the invaders. So Foresight gets systematically taken apart, with the final blow being Shalltear chasing down the mage who fled at her companions' behest. The big gut-punch comes afterward, however, when Ains shows how he honors the dead by making use of all of the mage's remains, including her voice. By comparison, her twin younger siblings innocently waiting for a big sis who will never come back didn't carry as much impact. I find giving backgrounds to characters right before they're killed off to be a cheap ploy, which rarely works to engender sympathy for the tertiary character about to be slaughtered, but this was one of the most effective uses of that device that I've seen in a long time. Kudos to the gentle use of musical score in places throughout that scene, which may have been the key to making it work.

Speaking of that, turning the musical score around to more tense orchestration was also effective in the epilogue scene, which built more on the relationship between the old mage and the young emperor, heavily implying that the emperor was actually the one pulling the strings on the tomb raid sponsorship. However, the main feature was Aura and Mare arriving on a dragon at the Imperial Palace and picking a fight with the Empire on behalf of Ains. With the local corps of adventurers no longer being an option, what new champions will this challenge draw out?

But the more immediate question I have is why Ains was dressed in a stripped-down playboy form, and especially why he was stylishly sporting what looked like a slave collar. Where did that come from? Otherwise this was another one of the series' strongest episodes to date.

Rating: A-

Overlord III is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.