(May contain mild spoilers if you haven’t watched the previous volumes)
It’s been a while since I watched Elemental Gelade 3, and I’m glad there’s a summary of “what just happened” at the beginning. As we see
Ren on the train and Cou running, there’s some nice dramatic music in the background. This episode has the Edel Hunter from earlier in it,
who we learn is a combination of abusive husband, neo-nazi, and world’s worst boss. Oh, and he’s a jerk, but he learns an important lesson. My prediction: he’ll be back before the end (duh).
In the second episode, Ren arrives at a town where every single building has a single point of failure that will cause it to collapse. The name of the episode is “The Village With the Large Windmill” but I personally think “Bad Engineeringstan” would have been a better name for both episode and location. The village also has a single point of failure, in that someone made the villiage build a giant wall in
front of a windmill, and now everyone upset because they don’t have any water any more, which the windmill used to pump out of the ground.
There’s some nice music here to, and the poetry is a nice touch too. Also, the characters are now driving around in an RV. I can’t say I remember any other anime where the characters travel by RV, but it actually makes sense if you think about it.
The next episode is on a cruise ship that looks incredibly ugly. Cou’s infected with a toxin that controls his mind, or something. There’s
some mind games and mystery, but the situation is actually pretty straightforward.
The last episode on the disk introduces a new character. I’ve noticed a very subtle but symbolic change in the opening – see if you can catch it too when your watching this one. The extras say that this is actually the third version of the opening, so I’m curious what difference between the second and the first is. Cou meets a fan who asks for his autograph on a wanted poster (he is sky pirate, after all). There’s a huge surprise at the end of this episode. There was a bit of a spell where Elemental Gelade was
starting to strike me as somewhat puerile, but the the final episode has convinced me once again of the series’ artistic value. DO NOT WATCH the next episode preview at the end of this disc. It seems to contain a terrible spoiler.