Strike Witches 2 - Episode 9

Episode nine of Strike Witches 2 begins with us spending some time with Perrine as she helps with rebuilding efforts in her native Gallia - An occasionally depressing task, not least when she's led by a young girl to a bridge that has been destroyed, leaving her lamenting the inability to put it right, knowing that even she doesn't have sufficient funds to get it fixed. This preoccupation with said bridge inspires her to some feats of daring against the Neuroi when she's next called into battle though, that's for sure.


Anyhow, no series such as this one would be complete without a beach episode of sorts, and that's exactly what we get here, dressed up in the name of "training" to spare us any more blatant excuses for putting all of the girls into swimsuits. Once that training is over however, Perrine becomes more than a little excited by Lucchini's discovery of what appears to be a treasure chest at the bottom of the sea, and after working their way through an array of chests within chests they eventually comes across what purports to be a treasure map.

Of course, Perrine can smell the opportunity to make some money and get her home town's bridge repaired, and so she sets off with Lucchini, Miyafuji and Lynette in tow to find the treasure, leaving the rest of the Witches worried as to their whereabouts and eventually following them. Cue Sakamoto getting drunk via some kind of booby trap (who gets drunk simply by having wine tipped on them? I must investigate this!), a giant moving statue, and a disappointing revelation for Perrine at the end of it all, tempered with an inevitable happy ending to her bridge conundrum.

As episodes of Strike Witches go, this was pretty much par for the course, giving us a bit of action before launching into some rather daft plot points that were nonetheless kind of entertaining if you can ignore the fact that they don't really make much sense at all. If nothing else, it was actually nice to see Perrine get a bit of an outing where she isn't acting aloof and stuck-up all the time, while Lucchini's presence always leaves me marvelling at Chiwa Saito's voice acting skills - that voice sounds hard to carry off.