In the Land of Leadale

Episode 6

I'll be honest: I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take away from the first half of this episode. First of all, it feels like some of the revelations here are treated with a fraction of the fanfare that they deserved given the setup from previous episodes. Up until now, we haven't really seen any other player characters aside from Cayna, with the implication being that either something happened to them or only Cayna was trapped in the game for all these years. So I'm a little surprised that Cayna ended up coming across an actual player character in this episode…a development that the show then proceeds to do absolutely nothing about. How long has this guy been in the game? What was he doing before getting trapped in it? Has he come across any other players in the game? Sure, he looks like an immature kid who's still treating his surroundings as a game instead of an alternate reality, so he may not have the answers to those questions either, but that just makes me more curious about his circumstances. We literally have little to nothing else to go off of.

Worse still, I am also progressively starting to question Cayna as a character. Not only am I confused as to why Cayna isn't asking any of these questions herself, but the episode also made it very clear that she would've been super comfortable killing this kid as punishment for his actions, which are born from his misguided assumption that he's playing a game. I'm not saying that this player leading a group of bandits that most likely robbed and killed other NPC's should be treated like any kind of friend. If anything, I like the fact that the end result was capturing him and putting him in jail. However, that was far from Cayna's first thought, and she needed to be threatened by her grandchild to consider the less violent choice of action to take. I don't know, it's a little bit hard to root for a character who is that brazen and impulsive about everything. Up until this point, the show has played up her extreme reactions for comedic effect when it comes to her family, but the said reactions also deprive the other, more serious interactions of much-needed nuance and depth.

Finally, the second half of this episode name drops some characters and seems to foreshadow other potential interactions to come, but the way it is executed – simply listing names and having Cayna reminisce about her relationship to them – just feels like a really lazy way to tell the story. I would've appreciated some flashbacks to the previous owner of the tower she found, or maybe a glimpse of what life was like in this game before it became what it is now. All in all, it feels like Leadale needs to have a clearer sense of direction moving forward, or at least balance its comedy with some interesting and understandable character motivations.

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In the Land of Leadale is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.