My hype levels were pretty high for this episode, because Team Russia would finally get their chance to shine. The fight was too short, which at this point makes the most sense since there’s only a few more chapters left and the anime still has to cover quite a bit. Anyways, here’s a 5-Line Recap of Terra Formars episode 7.
1. Michelle wakes up, tells Akari that he’s a good man, even though he doesn’t hear her, and then kicks some cockroach butt.
Wait a moment. Before going onto the next point, I feel like I need to address something about this episode. The animation and artstyle really dropped here. Some things still look great, like the cockroaches, the copters, and the animal/nature mini segments where the narrator tells us what power the Bugs 3 crew members have, but the characters themselves look like crap.
I feel bad for saying this too, because I’ve been watching Shirobako and know how hard it is to get a series like this together. But some of the scenes were really bad.
Alex and Akari have the exact same face here and whenever the camera panned out, the characters stopped looking like themselves. These two are only an example, there were many instances of scenes like this. Hopefully, whatever happened gets fixed and the animation quality goes back to the way it use to be.
Anywhoozie!
2. Yaeko takes her guard duties seriously, but still gets tempted by Alex and Akari to leave her post and let them have a peek at a naked Michelle.
3. Team Russia steps into the ring (YAY) and they soon find themselves fighting some cockroaches, at first, things are great but then the heads start coming off and crawling.
4. Turns out that Ivan just placed the cockroach in a drugged out state of mind, leaving them free to capture the roach and win.
5. Team China looks defeated and we still haven’t heard anything from Team Roma, so with that in mind Michelle tells Adolf to head to the crash site not knowing that there’s an army of roaches waiting for him and his team.
Thoughts:
At first, I was a bit annoyed by how short Team Russia’s fight was, but now that I look back it seems like the fight was always this short. There’s just certain things that happen after it that made it feel longer. The studios could have stretched the fight a bit, but this way is fine as well. Plus, with Team Russia’s fight now done, we’ll get to see Adolf do his thing in the next episode.
This picture scares me though, because I don’t know if the fight will start at this point or we’ll see what happens beforehand. As long as we get to see Aldolf I’m fine though. Anime viewers haven’t really seen much from him, but with the upcoming fight and the flashbacks (if they’re included) hopefully they’ll like him as much as I do.
The show is getting better, which I’m thankful for, but episode four is still the best one so far. I think now that we’re starting to see more of the Bug crew members and getting to hear their story and see their personality, the story has moved away from the previous episodes and is starting to now find its footing. It’s still not the greatest thing ever, but I’m enjoying it a lot more now than before.
The animation was still bad here though. Hopefully that gets fixed up and things go back to normal.
Overall, it was another okay episode, but things are starting to look a lot better for Terra Formars. Not so much for the characters, but for me at least.