Episode 04 – Beautiful Girl of the Beach – 海辺の美少女 (Umibe no Bishoujo)
This episode was pretty much all just build up, with a lot of info detailing the upcoming conflict between Ryuji and another level 10 breaker. The thing about the opponent is that he doesn’t quite seem to be a bad guy, but instead just has some misconceptions about Dragons themselves. Either ways, nothing really special happens aside from setting up the conflict (and introducing an ice dragon). Based on the next episode preview, at least we know the next episode should be full with plenty of fight scenes and action (or so I’d like to hope).
We get a ice dragon who goes by the name of Marga, who apparently needs Ryuji and Rose’s help in retrieving a powerful Lost precious sword artifact (called the Ice Rage) from another level 10 breaker, called “Bloody George”. Considering the rather fierce nickname for the guy, George ends up turning out as your typical energetic and naive character; it does make me wonder exactly how such a good-mannered guy will actually go all out and try to kill Ryuji and Rose.
The thing is, the reason why George wants to slay all dragons is because of a story he heard where a dragon attacked a human village in a rampage, and a hero wielding the Ice Rage killed that dragon. The same story does have a rather cliche, yet still interesting twist. The reason why the dragon rampaged in the village is because the villagers killed a girl that the dragon was in a love relationship with. This does explain the rather hostile relationship between dragons and humans, which would mean that Rose and Ryuji would be one of the first couple between humans and dragons for a very long time. This will almost definitely become a much more important aspect to future conflicts, even if it is kind of cliche.
We finally do get more hints at understanding what exactly a “level 10 breaker” is; from the looks of it, breakers are people that can wield the “lost precious” artifacts that have unique powers. The fact that Ryuji is a level 10 breaker probably means that people are born with their level already in place; if breaker level was obtained in training, there would be no way in hell he could have reached the max level as a young child.
Well, either ways this episode fleshed out some background for the conflict with some new info revealed. It did give us some insight into a few characters, but I’m still waiting for a more concrete overall plot. Right now it seems like this show will have a bunch of unconnected arcs, which kind of feel like filler. Also, there was some light hearted stuff at the beginning with the beach and all, but it wasn’t a terribly large part of the episode. I do wonder if the side characters will ever play a more important role in future episodes, but as of now they’re kind of useless add-ons. I guess we’ll eventually see the one who has a crush on Ryuji become aware of what’s going on, but that’s just my guess here.
Overall Enjoyment: 3.5/5
Screenshots are later in the post.
Next Episode Preview: Unpleasant Awakening – 忌まわしき覚醒 (Imawashiki Kakusei)
Distant Paradise 
Nice episode, but the an… Well I won’t comment about the animation quality anymore, haha.