Record of Grancrest War

Episode 20

This week's Record of Grancrest War episode seems to be mocking me for thinking its previous 19 episodes were significant. In “Pitched Battle of the Three Forces,” some of the show's most momentous developments are tossed out like so much garbage in exchange for one neat (if unconvincing) resolution. As some have guessed, the real enemy is neither the Union nor the Alliance, but the Mage Academy. This “gotcha” finish pivots away from everything that has mattered up until now, leaving us with a body count in the tens of thousands and tons of Marrine's bad decisions—all for what? If the plot can be resolved as easily as the heads of two opposing forces getting together in a room and talking about their problems, it is not a good plot.

Feel free to disregard the first half of this episode—the animators did. I've lost count of the different number of ways characters have appeared from scene to scene, but it's apparent that there are a lot of outsourced animators working to get Record of Grancrest War out the door each week. Siluca falls over in one art style and lands in Theo's arms in another, and the result is jarring. A lot of screens may seem downright familiar because they're reused from previous episodes. It's neat to see so many different warrior types with their own fighting styles and uniforms, but with very little time devoted to each, it feels like a game of Civilization that got out of control. I'll say that the sound designers made up for some of this with frequently gross sounds of death and dying.

The real meat of the episode occurs in its second half, when Theo, Marrine, and Alexis get together in a room and work out all of their problems in a couple of minutes. Alexis assures Marrine that he doesn't care if she lost her virginity to another guy. Theo pops up and says that he and Siluca are getting married, so why don't Alexis and Marrine follow suit? Somehow, they agree with this. Nobody cares that Marrine has refused Alexis all this time, that her stubbornness has led to a massive war with an enormous body count, that her troops killed her cousin over all this, that she has refused to stop fighting over and over and over—none of that matters, it turns out. This leads to the glaring conclusion that Record of Grancrest War has taken us all for a pointless ride that could have been resolved much sooner. The writing has been on the wall for weeks—there was no reason for Marrine continuing to refuse Alexis, except for the ones she was making up herself. I bet Alexis feels pretty stupid knowing that all he had to do was show up on her doorstep to get all her resolve to crumble.

The more infuriating thing is the revelation that all of the conflicts so far have been window dressing concealing the actual threat, the Mage Academy. “A truce would only benefit the true enemy,” Marrine says. No, it wouldn't. Killing each other instead of the true enemy, like we've been doing all this time, would benefit the true enemy. Why haven't we been fighting the Mage Academy? If Marrine's goal is to keep the Great Hall massacre from repeating itself, as she keeps saying, why not get everyone together to fight as a unified force? We're probably going to spend the next four episodes doing just that anyway. I feel like a total idiot for starting Record of Grancrest War at episode one when, for all its breakneck pacing, only stuff that happens from episode 20 on will matter in the end.

Rating: D

Record of Grancrest War is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Lauren writes about geek careers at Otaku Journalist.