Isekai Quartet 3, episode 10

Episode Rating: B

It’s finally time for the music festival! This being Isekai Quartet, naturally the performances weren’t going to go off without the final boss showing up and a fight breaking out. It’s so expected at this point that hardly anyone in Class 2 even seems fazed by it. In fact, they take it all in stride and fight off the animated morning glories literally without missing a beat.

That shows how in tune with the rules of this world most of Class 2 is by this point. They know they were tasked with giving a performance, and little considerations like monster attacks have no bearing on that. Extending that logic to restrict anyone who’s not on stage from fighting back (because they would be disrupting the performance) is the clever extension of those rules here. Yunyun winding up doing a solo as she represents Class 3 is less inspired; that trick was used in season 2’s athletic festival.

And as I expected, Cid/Shadow does show up to play the piano, though as an emergency fill-in for Class 2 rather than in support of Class 1. He’s sometimes shown playing Moonlight Sonata in his own series, but that’s too mournful a song for this setting, so it makes sense that he’d be playing something different here. He’s also known to do variations on his signature “I Am Atomic” spell, so here we get the An Die Freude version – aka, “Ode to Joy.”

Slightly disappointingly, this doesn’t capture the snap that this series is typically known for. It does provide a handful of deeper references, such as Sebas from Overlord dealing with troublemakers Betelgeuse from Re:Zero and Motoyasu from Shield Hero. Aside from them being somewhat alike in being irritatingly obsessed with love, the full gimmick hers is that both are voiced by Yoshitsugu Matsuoka; this would hardly be the first time that the franchise has put two characters voiced by the same actor together in the same scene as a gimmick, so undoubtedly this was intentional. Ains needing prompts to get his cymbal playing down right could be a reference to a not-well-educated background. And I’m not sure what was going on with Yunyun on stage after her performance as the protagonists talk in the foreground.

In all, it wasn’t a bad episode, and it was neat seeing all of Class 2 playing instruments, but this isn’t one of the series’ highlight episodes, either.