Record of Grancrest War – Episode 2 (Review)

By: ZelyhonWith the second episode of Grancrest, we slow the pace down a bit to see the first reactions to Theo and Siluca's (but mostly Siluca's) first steps towards achieving stability and expanding their power base.  Things are still going quickly, but not quite as breakneck of a pace as the first episode.  It takes them a whole episode to take over a second noble's territory instead of just the last few minutes of one!  That's a step in the right direction.Joking aside, though, we do get several new characters this episode.  Balgary is definitely a fun addition and should be fun to have around as a mascot character.  I quite enjoyed the very cat-like "Yes, I will tolerate you petting me behind my ears, human" introduction.  Aishela scares me more than a little bit with how she acted in the battle.  While I wasn't surprised by her leaping towards the mercenary that impressed her and kissing him, I was not necessarily expecting her to start strangling him while she did it.  I'll be very curious to see where the story takes her.  Incidentally, I was also amused by multiple characters expressing astonishment that Siluca actually had a friend.  Lassic hasn't made much of an impression on me yet.  His surrender was quite unexpected, but I'm now curious how he's going to fit into Theo's new kingdom.  His attitude feels much more warmonger-y than Theo's "protect the innocent" goal would square with.  Regardless, I'm eager to see all the characters get some time to play off of each other and learn more about all of them.The action this episode was fun.  We got to see some examples of mage combat, even if one of them primarily used a sword.  It's still interesting to me how Theo really isn't a good fighter to start with.  It makes me wonder how he was able to beat a chaos monster to get his crest in the first place.  I can understand having room to grow, but he's starting pretty far down and I feel like if he'd gotten into a physical fight with anyone aside from the enemy mage, he'd have been beaten handily.  I'm curious to see him improve through the course of the show.I still have a lot of questions about the show that I want answered.  We've seen crests imbued into weapons and armor in the first episode, but why are they so tied to defeating Chaos?  Siluca was going to try in the first episode and she doesn't have a crest.  What is it about her magic that can summon Chaos, but not destroy it?  For that matter, what exactly does it mean that she mastered six colors of magic?  We see some of her spellcasting here, but nothing that seems to explicitly tie to any of that yet.  What is going on with the characters with the moving tattoos?  Does that tie into Aishela calling herself an artist?  I want the answer to several of these questions and I'm really hoping the show doesn't let me down.