Another strong episode. Definitely not as good as last week’s (I’d give it a 7.5 out of 10), but a more than fitting conclusion to the Yokosuka chapter.
I really liked the changes made to Nozomi’s rescue and the larger role given to Goro, but felt that Mark’s motivations for helping weren’t explored thoroughly enough. Afterwards, he says something to the extent of “Of course I helped you, we work together,” but I’d wager that most people wouldn’t risk their lives taking on a vicious gang for a co-worker, especially one that they’ve only known for a matter of days.
It’s clear that a lot of this episode’s budget went into the combat scenes, and, as a result, there were a few sections elsewhere where the animation was noticeably bad. I guess this is to be expected on a budget production like this, but, in an ideal world, compromises like this wouldn’t need to be made. The fight itself was very well done though.
In terms of other changes, I liked that Guizang got injured saving his father rather than Ryo, but wasn’t a fan of them cutting some of the Nozomi stuff and Tom’s goodbye. The former I could perhaps forgive as they added in some other nice scenes that were arguably an improvement, but the lack of Tom was perplexing. To be clear, I have no issue with them cutting it, but doing so makes their decision to spend so much of the first episode developing Tom’s character a little pointless. I’m not sure we’ve seen him once since then, so they may as well have just cut him entirely and spent that time adding some of the other standalone stuff back in.
A few other little observations… this is the first episode with no Bailu (can’t say I’m too disappointed about not seeing the village dance) and, assuming there’s not a random flashback, it seems as though the poetry scroll will play no role in the anime (so let’s hope it’s not significant to the story). On the whole, I’d probably rate the Yokosuka arc 8/10, which is much better than I had expected. I’ll be happy if part two is this good.