As expected, Rolling Girls eased off the accelerator this week in order to transition into what will likely be its standard format – the girls visit a new country, trouble happens, the girls either solve it or are just sort of there, everyone moves on. I’m totally fine with that format given the fun of Rolling Girls’ aesthetics – but as I say in my post, the real trial here will be in making the leads themselves fun people to follow. The show isn’t there yet, which is a shame, but we’ve still got time.

My full ANN post is available here. Notes below!

“After the disbandment of the legendary vigilant squad of the Third District, Tokyo Always, the cosplaying state vigilante squad was created to maintain order – the Knights of the Twin Towers”

The leader of the group, Thunderoad, defends Comima.

Some real nonsense “her sword has these abilities” here. Nice attack animation, though

Episode three – “I wanna be a hero”

So we’ve got our rolling girls on the road now

Collecting Moonlight Stones

The blond-haired girl has a little memory television

Power stones that rain from the sky – seems like these are what empower Bests

The show’s doing a good job of masking its CG motorcycles

6:15 – More of those lovely watercolor backgrounds from the first episode

Definitely a much slower and more visually reserved episode compared to the premier pair

Nozomi’s kind of unsure about all of her weird companions

Everyone’s worried about the Dynamite Bombers. And the derpy Thunderoad loses her Moonlight Stone

“Checkpoint workers are assigned from countries with no vested interest in the area.” Still really liking this show’s emergent worldbuilding

10:06 – Good group image here

Every country has their own customs. Here, they have to wear silly wizard outfits and top hats

10:33 – Also a good image

So this country is a festival year round, I guess? It’s the old Comiket

Yeah. The “city” here is a mega-version of the Tokyo Big Sight convention center

Thunderoad’s thone room is great. And again, great to see the actual show using those pastel backgrounds from the first episode

Getting a pretty good picture of Ai’s personality at this point

The articulation of Nozomi’s fantasies is also nice visually

And now we see Nozomi’s dad acting like the child he clearly is. Perfect

And Chi can talk to animals, apparently

17:48 – Aaaand Nozomi randomly throws up

More politics of the peacekeeping organization that manages the stones. It seems highly likely that the manager here is Chi’s mother

Oh then they just spell that out in the next shot whoops

20:37 – Nice “this friggin’ girl” face on Garm the crow

Alright, so now we’ve got a bit more of the structure. And based on the ending animation, we’ll be running into a bunch more vignettes with various characters our girls roll into