Although the previous episodes share some interesting information about the current state of the great snow sea, the main storyline itself still focuses on the orbital tree. The first episode is about the introduction to the orbital tree, while the second episode is about descending the colossal tree.
Judging by what happened at the end of episode 2, our main characters should still be on the tree right now, or at the very least, they should arrive at their destination soon. So let’s see what kind of challenges that they will have to overcome once they land on the great snow sea.
Traveling Down The Orbital Tree
Continuing from the previous episode, Kaina and Ririha are currently climbing down the orbital tree. Since Ririha has never climbed the orbital trees before, Kaina decided that they should take their time and descend with a rather slow and steady pace, with lots of rest along the way. After about 30 days, they finally arrived at a place that is connected to the inside of the orbital tree. Since the branches are quite sturdy in these parts, both of them can simply walk down for the rest of the journey.
As soon as they get close enough to the snow sea, however, they are spotted by Valghian ships that happen to be patrolling the area. Realizing that the enemy’s princess is currently unprotected, the Valghian dispatched their soldiers in order to either capture or kill the princess. Luckily for Kaina and Ririha, Atland’s searching party who has been looking for Ririha for days also happens to be in the area, and they also enter the fray in order to save their princess.
Meanwhile, Kaina who’s been living in a peaceful community his whole life, is shocked to see fellow humans trying to kill each other. Nevertheless, he knows that this is no time to think about the morality of strangers, so he grabs Ririha’s hand, and jumps together to flee from their pursuers, into the white snow sea.
Slow Pace + Uneventful Story
As mentioned in the opening paragraph above, it’s clear that the show runner has successfully flexed their world-building muscle for all the viewers to see in the first two episodes. After all, it’s true that from what we’ve seen so far, the orbital tree and everything around it are so captivating and wondrous to see.
However, therein lies the problem. There’s barely anything happening. One of the very first rules of storytelling is to give a conflict that the main characters have to face and overcome in order to achieve their objectives. Climbing down the great tree is merely an obstacle. In a time when everything has to move at a blazing speed, Kaina of the Great Snow Sea barely presents any worthy opponents or challenges for the heroes to overcome.
We know there’s a conflict happening, namely the war between Atland vs Valghian, but the story takes too long to get there. The pace of these early episodes are simply so slow that it’s understandable if the viewers simply tuned out before the story reached the interesting part. That’s what makes the story thus far seem rather boring, which would inevitably lead to the diminishing viewer counts.
A Redemption At The End
This is actually a continuation of the previous section. Because while it’s true that the series has been rather slow and uneventful even after three episodes in, the last five minutes of episode three is actually quite exciting. As mentioned in the summary above, there is an ambush situation going on with some minor skirmishes happening between a small army from both countries. So yes, episode three actually ended in a rather promising note.
This cliffhanger tells us that the intro for this series has finally ended, and now, we can finally get to the meat of the story. It’s not ideal that it took three episodes to complete the intro, but at least we can finally get to the supposedly most exciting part of Kaina of the Great Snow Sea. The war between Atland and Valghian, and Kaina’s role within that conflict.
We already talked about some of the possible paths for Kaina in the previous review, such as being an active soldier for the Atland, or maybe taking up the role of the explorer who set out to find the truth behind the water supply problem. Either one of those can be interesting to watch, as long as the show runner can execute it properly. So for now, let’s hope for the best.
Episode three marks the end of Kaina and Ririha’s journey of climbing down the orbital tree. And judging from the lack of meaningful conflict from the story thus far, we can safely assume that this episode also marks the end of the introduction part of the series. There’s some really exciting things going on at the end of episode three. Hopefully we can expect more of that in the subsequent episodes.