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Rating: 9.2/10

Impressions:

I just love this show now. After the big battle that was last episode, the show retreats back into character development mode and deals with some serious relational issues with Sara and her coworkers. It kinda pissed me off seeing Sara just take the beating by Mariette and not even saying anything. I was really hoping she’d express her reason for not retaliating, which is obviously because she’s been through the same situation and knows how it feels. But I would have really liked to see Sara go agro on Mariette and say straight to her face that she’s not the only one who’s suffered. Anyway though, the moment is incredible serious and provides potential for the show to evolve this particular branch of the story. Sara’s new possible love interest is also getting more screen time along with the other Reisners, though I hope the Gambee pilots aren’t thrown out in terms of their roles as characters. Mariette will probably return later on and hinder Sara during some important activity, causing all sorts of trouble to make people hate her more. I do hope that she actually dies a painful and pitiful death, and not ‘learn her lesson and become a good person’.

Isabella shouldn’t have died either. She hasn’t suffered enough for targeting Sara. She also hasn’t expressed the shock of learning how useless she is compared to Sara. That’s how all mechas should be like; the lowly, unimportant, hated initial rival of the main character gets owned by the main character and expresses (extremely satisfying) shock. Oh well. I think most people will agree with me that Soukou no Strain has an incredibly attractive storyline. The quality remains quite mediocre, though the psychology and plot of this show more than make up for it. Of course, it would be much better if it has higher quality. Sara is providing the majority of the complicated emotional divergences with her ever-changing mentality. She started off as any other ‘normal’ character, a happy, eager and somewhat thick-headed character, but the shock deaths of her three closet friends and the betrayal of her dear brother changed all that. Since then, she has remained a cold statue refusing to open up to anyone, and forced to hide her identity too.

But now, with her new accompaniment, the Reisner team, she is showing signs of slowly regaining her former state of mind. It should happen over an extended period of time to increase the drama, though I don’t know where it will go from there. I hope the show’s mood doesn’t lighten too much. It needs dark and hurtful moments like Sara’s beating every now and then. I’m also looking forward to hearing that shriek of hers again. It looks like the current cast will be a constant throughout much of the series, which means each character needs to be properly developed. This means no per-character episodes, and especially not in sequence, and interaction between all of the characters. There definitely is not enough time for time wasted on character development, but it is an essential aspect, which means proper integration of it in plot-flowing episodes will be perfect. I’m very disappointed that this series is only 13 episodes long, but that means there will should be no pacing problems, especially with how it’s going so far.

Preview:

Next episode - #6
Another battle…?

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