Time for your weekly dose of Team RWBY courtesy of the guys over at Rooster Teeth.
Episode 5
After a break last week for the debut of new series “World of Remnant” where we learn more of the world RWBY is set in, this week’s episode of the main series is slightly disappointing. We begin this episode with a very cool, very well animated fight between a character we’ve seen virtually nothing of in Vol. 2, Pyrrha (unnecessarily complicated spelling anyone?) and a bunch of dudes and Cardin. The fight is brilliantly realised and the animation comes into its own here. It’s smooth and sleek and there are no wasted moves. Pretty much perfectly animated, as is the second fight with Mercury.
This fight is again brilliantly animated for all the same reasons but is quite clearly designed for Mercury to find out first hand how Pyrrha fights. This is confirmed in the last scene but we’ll get to that later. Pyrrha’s voice acting in the scene is unusually weak for a show which normally produces strong performances. She sounds very, very wooden and it certainly affects the immersion that the show usually creates quite well in the world. We’re soon shown a series of scenes which are basically all to say that Blake is having a bit of a rough time of it. The bags under her eyes here are a nice touch. Sun getting shot down is a funny moment that hits the emotional beat quite well and the scene with all four of our heroines together is funny too, and really nails the emotional beats without missing a single one.
One thing I will say about this scene is that Weiss’ voice acting is really off here, not at all up to the usual standard. It’s odd for both her and Pyrrha to put in weak performances in the same episode, but I’m sure there are reasons for it and I hope it doesn’t become a trend. Some foreshadowing (possibly a team up episode with Yang and Weiss soon?) and some Blake being a great big B later, we get the highlight of the episode. Jaune, my personal favourite character I must say, shows off some more of that brilliant awkwardness by singing to Weiss to ask her to the dance. Yes you read that right, singing. It’s just a nice touch that they’d use something that was, let’s be honest here fellas, used by many of us awkward idiots to ask girls out.
The final scene of the episode (which comes after a pretty inconsequential scene where we’re reminded of some plot points from Vol. 1) is another ominous villain chat. They seem to have some sort of “list” of potential threats maybe? It’s unclear right now but whatever it is can’t be good. They also seem to have some plan for the dance but what the plan is remains to be seen.
All in all, it’s probably the weakest episode of the season so far. Nothing much happens really and it feels like an episode chock full of setup and completely devoid of payoff, which is never a good idea. The episode starts strong with the fights but the character driven stuff for the other 10 minutes or so just ends up being boring when you can tell that it’ll be 5 or 6 more weeks until we get actual payoff. The episode does its job however, and sets up numerous plot lines effectively.
You can check out the episode here and check back next week to see if the stuff from this week leads anywhere anytime soon.
