Hey, look who else is late on this week’s review! I am an extremely busy woman nowadays with college and whatnot, so I haven’t had much time to write one of these up. Anyway, here’s a review of the latest episodes of Drifters!
Right off the bat, we get some exposition about who the Drifters and the Ends are from the girl that was introduced in the last episode. She explains to the Drifters that Ends are pretty much the same thing as them, but evil. She also explains that she’s a part of the Octoberist organization, a group that’s dedicated to bringing together all the Drifters in order to defeat the ends, meaning I was wrong for mistaking them for the antagonist group and thinking they were interchangeable with the Ends. Big mistake on my part. Any who, before I start dwelling on a mistake I made earlier, the Drifters asks the girl why she thinks that they’re Drifters and not Ends, and she tells them that it’s because they display emotions outside of anger and bitterness. She also explains that the main goal of the Ends is to wipe out all of humanity because… they’re evil, and you don’t need any further explanation beyond that. She offers the for the Drifters to join them, but Nobunaga declines the offer and instead suggests that she works for them so that the Drifters may take over this strange little elf world and bring peace to their land. Anyway, the Ends are discussing their plans for human genocide, and how the Drifters shouldn’t unite at any cost, so pretty much just typical bad guy exposition. And we get more unfunny hijinx afterwards as the crew tries to gather up support from the elf people, so not much else to talk about here, other than the fact that the elf people age very slowly. Like, Araki levels of slow aging. They get the elves on their side, the enemies prepare to attack, and that’s pretty much the gist of the episode. Onto the next one!
The next episode has the Drifters training the elves in combat, and while that’s going on, we see Nobunaga is planning to turn away any of the opposing soldiers by creating a compact of dead bodies, urine, and fecal matter. Yeah, it’s just as gross as it sounds. The Octoberist girl asks why they’re doing this to the corpses, Nobunaga just says that the bodies are going to rot away anyway, so they might as well speed up the process by mixing them with piss and shit. He then asks the girl to get them some sulfur, because lord knows that waste and decaying corpses weren’t enough. After that whole thing, Shimazu gives a big motivational speech to the elves as they prepare for battle, and the big fight begins. The elves start the fight by lighting the whole village on fire, and shooting their shit-covered arrows at the soldiers. Unfortunately for the soldiers, the well has also been filled with shit, so have fun with the tetanus! So pretty much, the elves used their whole village as a trap, Shimazu takes the commander’s head, and any of the surviving soldiers eventually ended up falling into Nobunaga’s pit of spikes-n’-shit. After the fact, we get a little bit of backstory for Yoichi, and we learn that his Dad was kind of a jerk to him. Like, really kind of a jerk to him. The episode ends with the Drifters infiltrating the king’s castle in order to save the captive women, and when they finally get to them, of course they’ve already been abused/raped, because you can’t have bad guys in the animus if they’re not rapey. Anyway, onto the last episode.
In the last episode of the recap, Nobunaga and the Octoberist girl come across a painting of the Father of Orte, the founder of this world’s empire who started a rebellion through his wonderful speaking skills, and then he offed himself after founding Orte. The elves then come in to tell Nobunaga about the sex slaves that Shimazu found. Nobunaga comes in right when Shimazu is telling the elves not to kill the men because he wants to do it instead, and then he gets knocked out by Nobunaga, who then tells the elves to kill them anyway. After finishing the castle raids, the story of the Drifters started to spread among the elves as more of them started to join the cause and rebel against the Orte rule. Of course, this causes the government to worry, because more people rebelling = bye, bye empire. So while they’re discussing their plans for keeping their power, the ever powerful Count-Saint Germi, who was an important player in the Orte rebellion, shows up to help the emperor with maintaining his power. Anyway, we see more training and speeches from both sides, and the episode ends with the Ends showing up to attack.
While I’m still quite enjoying the show, I’m starting to see quite a few of the show’s more… glaring issues the more I continue watching. Firstly, I fear that the show might end up following a repetitive structure. Basically, the past three episodes could be summed up as “Drifters train the elves, they end up killing some people, the Ends/government retaliate, rinse and repeat.” Granted, the show is about halfway finished at this point, so I don’t think they’d meander that much, but the fact that the most recent episode ended with more training and fighting makes me a little bit worried. Another problem I have is that the character personalities haven’t been fleshed out at all. Outside of some vague backstory for Yoichi, we don’t really get any development from Shimazu, Nobunaga, or even any of the elves, which just makes me not care about any of their conflicts. Granted, Hellsing didn’t have the most three-dimensional cast ever, but at the very least they were still fun to watch because I could at least say that they had distinguishable personalities. The main trio of Drifters, on the other hand, are pretty samey and are pretty much near identical when it comes to their personality, that being the same kind of cold and ruthless Alucard-esque personality. It might just be me becoming a more cynical person recently, but my enjoyment of this show is starting to drop, despite it still being somewhat entertaining overall and still having good production values.