Short Synopsis: Dio and Leda run into some old acquaintances and Ouji reveals a few things about his past.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10 (Excellent)
It’s good to see that Dio and Leda get their fair share of attention. While they are my least favourite characters of this series, their extra development is quickly getting rid of these problems, and makes the two of them more enjoyable with every episode that focuses on them. In this episode, they meet Braiking Boss’ top soldiers before Dio and Leda arrived: Barkan and Mars. The two are still angry for the two of them taking their place.

The interesting thing here is that they too beat the crap out of Dio, though still all he can think about is how he can’t win of Casshern. Leda manages to save him and leads the two of them away, but something bugs me about her reaction when Dio returned (pumped up by Braiking Boss’ words of motivation): her joy at seeing Dio back was definitely acted. I’m still not exactly sure about what she’s planning, but she definitely has a hidden agenda. This series has shown by now that she simply isn’t as strong as Casshern or Dio, so instead she has to resort to trickery and deceit more.

Speaking of which, Braiking Boss also hasn’t been simply wandering around for no possible reason. Something’s telling me that he’s trying to set up Casshern and Dio against each other, but what especially bugs me is how in the ED, he’s lying right next to Luna. You’d think that that would be a place for Dune, so what’s he doing there?

But my favourite part of this episode was obviously Ouji’s background. He seems to be some sort of cyborg: mostly human, but with artificial limbs. It turns out that the reason he’s taking care of Ringo is because she saved him when he was at the bottom of despair, when she was only just an infant. That really begs the question to what she is, though. I can understand how Ouji is a cyborg: the guy was a scientist for Braiking Boss, so I guess that he also had enough time to experiment on his own body. But Ringo on one side is just a regular child who grows up, gets hurt, and apparently doesn’t need any food (at least, we’ve never seen the two of them eat so far), and at the same time she feels the effects of the destruction just like any other robot…

Short Synopsis: Munto continues to try and get Yumemi over to his world, while Yumemi has her own problems to take care of.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10 (Good)
Hehe, you were expecting Ride Back at this spot, no? To be honest, so did I before I watched Ride Back’s second episode, but then I started thinking: the show has 12 episodes, of which the first two were slow introductions that hardly did anything besides setting up the premise. It’s going to be a show about some teenagers riding motorbikes who somehow become involved in a huge war. How the heck are the creators going to get some good development in only 12 episodes? This is Madhouse we’re talking about: compared to some of its previous series Ride Back just isn’t as interesting.

Besides, the lack of realism really became jarring in that second episode: nobody finds it strange that these Ride Back things simply drive around INSIDE BUILDINGS? Nobody tries to complain about the noise that these machines cause? Nobody finds it strange that these machines tend to break down and crash a lot? Nah, I’d rather see a bunch of elves beating the hell out of each other.

So I’ve yet to see the Munto OVAs, but apparently I don’t need to do that anymore since the first episode copied about 80% of its content. That episode reminded me a lot of a poorer version of Noein’s first episode, with the big difference being that Noein spent lots of time in its first episode to flesh out the cast before diving into the action, while Munto dived straight into the action without letting the viewer get to know the characters.

Well, that problem was partially solved by this episode, which was very un-typical of your average second episode. Most of the second episodes after a huge eventful first episode are deliberately slow, in order to explain what the heck went on in the show’s start. Munto instead deliberately chooses to slow down the pacing, but doesn’t attempt to explain much. Instead, it starts fleshing out the lead characters. I especially was surprised that they immediately showed the story for one of Yumemi’s friends.

I also like that the creators are using the Noein approach. With most series where the lead character is transported into some sort of other world, the connection between these is really something sacred: it can only be crossed once, and the conditions for someone to cross are very vague and only serve as a plot device to get the lead character involved with the plot. In Munto instead that link is fleshed out a bit more, and it looks like it can be breached more often. Seeing as how Yumemi’s friends are going to be important characters in this series too, I expect that either the series will take place mostly in the real world with your occasional trips to the elf world, or Munto is somehow going to kidnap the three of them at the same time.

Now, about the lesser parts of this series… we have a delinquent who gets saved by a cute girl and they end up marrying. Am I the only one who was reminded of a certain other Kyoani series? I also fear that most of the elves are going to lack in personality: this episode hardly focused any attention on them.