World Trigger Season 2

Episode 4

You gotta hand it to Border. They took that first invasion on the chin and used it as a valuable learning experience to prepare for this second one. Last time both the agency and the city took heavy damage and finished with several agents kidnapped and at least one hospitalized. But this time Border came out of it with technically a negative body count. Some may call that anticlimactic, I call it good planning.

Good planning, and also Tachikawa being a reckless ace who's willing to gamble on a suicide attack. Yes, he's in a trion body so he wouldn't actually die, but if his plan had failed or Konami had been a second late with her ax, the entire mission would have gone up in trion smoke. Still, restorable energy body or no it's gotta be unnerving to let your own ally slice you in half to get a shot at the enemy. Self-mutilation seems to be the order of the day, actually, since Kazama takes a page out of Yuma's book and sets up his own severed arm as a decoy to take out Rata, the enemy's support fighter. It's another way that Border's unique structure makes for some great shonen storytelling – while two attackers are technically rivals and have been at odds before, they're still on the same side and capable of learning from one another both directly and indirectly.

In fact, even Hyuse learns something this episode: the power of friendship! Or at least the convenience of coinciding interests with your ostensible enemies. When he approaches Reighi, the last remaining Galopoula soldier, he's rebuffed almost immediately as a potential spy – which tracks considering from the invaders' perspective their whole plan seemed to have been leaked to the enemy, and they have no way of knowing about Jin's precognition. What makes less sense is his attempt to make Hyuse kidnap Yotaro as collateral. Sure it's a bluff, but also what if Hyuse actually did it? What's your exit strategy, guy? Tell the potential enemy, who just got his specialized trigger back, that actually the deal's off? Honestly he's lucky Hyuse' definition of “kidnap” includes just stabbing the twerp, since it makes the whole double bluff a lot cleaner and less awkward.

Of course Hyuse doesn't actually kill Yotaro, though the kid deserved it for his eternal duckface. Instead he fakes the whole thing because, like most of World Trigger's cast, he's a reasonable person who can think through the consequences of actions. Plus I like to think that, even if he won't admit it, he has a soft spot for the capybara kid – he was the one to bring Hyuse back his homeworld trigger after all! That said it's still a pretty understated moment, the short ensuing fight notwithstanding, and it's frankly a strange note to end this whole invasion arc on.

Which is really a problem for this whole set of episodes. While this story did let some of the extended cast show off, the tactical advantage Jin and Amo's side-effects offered the good guys made it all but impossible for them to lose, and none of the Galopoula enemies really get enough character to carry their role as underdogs. They're largely professional, logical soldiers who do their jobs to the best of their ability, and Reighi's brief flashback to when their world was conquered by Atfokrator is the only real glimpse of humanity we see with any of them. With no immediate stakes and mostly flat adversaries, this whole story feels like a roundabout way to get Hyuse to join Tamakoma-2, and that's just not enough to carry a month's worth of episodes, no matter how nice some of those fights look.

Still, with this whole affair wrapped up we can finally return to the B-Rank Wars with our actual main characters, and by god I can't wait to see these kids in motion. Osamu looks to have a new strategy up his sleeve, Chika's got some new moves, and at least one of the teams they'll be facing looks formidable. It feels weird to say that moving from a full-on invasion to essentially an e-sports tournament has raised the excitement levels, but that's just part of World Trigger's charm, and I'm hyped to see how this new and improved animation team can channel that.

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World Trigger Season 2 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.