1. The Journey Continues
Okay, first of all, these titles are definitely a mouthful. I mean, if it wasn’t enough to read or write them, it’s also something to hear Andre Robinson scream them at the start of each episode.
Also, remember, there will be spoilers.
“From the Sky Maze of Anguish to the Swamp of Sorrow” finds our heroes well on their journey. Princess Lyra is trying to find safe harbor for Niko until he has a chance to fully mature and become the warrior they desperately need to defeat Nar Est. “Normally with the Champion, I head straight for the Volcano,” she tells Mandok, the sidekick-who-isn’t-a-sidekick. “Finding safe harbor is new to me.” After a quick trip down a waterfall, they come across the Maze of Anguish, overseen by a spider-boar hybrid creature. Most of the action takes place on these intricate branches, with our heroes being pursued by a creature who’s one part Fluffy and one part (or maybe three parts) the Shenzi, Banzai, and Ed from The Lion King while also avoiding another monstrous creature. The episode doesn’t need to bite off as much as the pilot and the pace and delivery are much stronger for it.
2. Flash Struggles
One of the biggest limitations of Niko and the Sword of Light is its animation quality. Like a lot of modern shows, it looks like it was produced quickly with Flash or something, giving us crisp clean lines and nice design work but also a static background with somewhat jerky foreground action. Director Sun Jin Ahn does his best to inject energy and excitement to the material, throwing in POV shots with anime action lines to help give a sense of danger and intensity, yet there remains a stillness to the scenes, a static quality to the compositions not matching the energy the rest of the show’s trying to generate. This is most obvious in the waterfall slide scene, where Niko falls into a series of rapid. The sequence is only a couple seconds long but it feels shorter and less fun than it wants to be. Things do pick up in the Maze with the creature flying around but the show struggles to generate that tension it wants there as well.
3. Meanwhile, Back at the Volcano
The show does develop more traction whenever the bad guys are hanging around. Steve Blum hams it up as Nor Est, who isn’t really that great at making things. Like Lyra, he’s stuck in this perpetual loop, his powers subdued because the last of the humans escaped into their crystal prison. He’s a slick character, zipping around, imposing when he needs to be yet still unable to move forward or evolve. There’s some business with a Dark Jewel but really, the Nor Est scenes are about the bad guy shapeshifting and being evil. I particularly like the colors in these sequences, the wicked purples especially.
4. O the Anguish O the Turmoil
For being about Niko, the show doesn’t necessarily have a lot for Niko to say. He doesn’t have the anguish or guilt of Aang or the wanderlust of a Skywalker boy. From the moment he emerged from the chrysalis, he’s been single-minded in destroying evil. That leaves most of the heavy lifting to Lyra. In “From the Maze of Anguish to the Swamp of Sorrow,” the show continues to develop her past failures and formidable shame at them. For instance, Lyra’s done these challenges so many times it’s no longer a problem for her to get through them. Bored, she guides Niko through the maze while he hops, jumps, and skips over the various traps. Other characters constantly confront her with how many times she’s undergone through this and Nor Est even bemoans how she manages to take more and more of a Crystal or something after each attempt on the Volcano.
The biggest turn in the episode comes when she breaks the link and becomes corporeal, helping to prevent Niko from plummeting to his death in a lake of acid. For the first time in nearly a millennium, she’s also part of this journey, something that doesn’t sit too well with the old people in the High Council.
Continued belowNiko and the Sword of Light is at its most interesting when Lyra’s working through her own junk, trying to atone for centuries of failure. I’m sure this will continue going forward just fine.
5. Sinking Sinking Sinking
The episode ends on a cliffhanger, with Lyra, Niko, Mandok, and the Fluffy/ShenziBanzaiEd creature stuck in quicksand. It’s a finely earned moment, even though the Fluffy/ShenziBanzaiEd creature has been more grating than intimidating since it was introduced. It feels like we’re still getting our first impressions of these characters and creatures rather than seeing them as something to invest our attention in.
Niko and the Sword of Light throws out all these lines to try to distinguish itself and I don’t know if it has introduced enough of its world or history to sustain another 11 episodes. The team behind it continue to introduce more creatures and establish rules about what’s what and who’s who, like how the boar/spider thing they fought in this episode is just an evil creature, not something touched by Nor Est’s darkness. Niko is going to have to start seeing and understanding stuff soon or else this whole series is in danger of becoming some juvenile trifle of an adventure.
