Shangri-La Frontier – Season 1 Episode 23 Recap & Review

Episode 23

As Lycagon’s mark prevents the miasma and scares away monsters, the new area is very easy for Sunraku and the bunnies. He suggests they climb the rocks to go faster, but there are incredibly powerful monsters. Emul and Bilac say even they have trouble going against the Crystal Scorpions. 

Even though that only makes Sunraku more excited, the bunnies urge him to stay on the path they are now. When he sees a monster’s silhouette, the bunnies ask him to run, as it means there are at least a dozen more Scorpions near them.

After walking for a while, they arrive at a strange black dome. The area turns foggy and the boss appears, the Humming Lich. Sunraku predicts he can curse players so he rushes and attacks the skeleton, but his attack doesn’t do anything. Bilac explains that they need a holy-attribute weapon, something they don’t have.

Bilac has an idea and asks Sunraku to cover for her for a few minutes. So he puts Emul in his arm and uses the Rabbit Gun again. It’s effective, but not as much as he expected. Suddenly, after hitting the monster with Magic Edge for a second time, the skeleton summons several clones, each with different weapons.

Thankfully, at the same time, Bilac throws Dullahan’s Decapitator to him, now with a holy attribute. However, Sunraku can only use it 8 times. So he makes an experiment to learn more about the Lich. After one clone hits the main body by mistake, the player discovers they share HP and that it’s low.

To start his plan, Sunraku throws Bilac far away and runs with Emul on his arm. As he stacks many skills at once, the rabbit uses Magic Edge on the clones. Firstly, he kills the archer and then goes for the Lich with an ax. With that strategy, they quickly destroy all clones in one attempt.

Now he has two attacks and has to kill the area boss with them. Sunraku throws Emul up and she uses Magic Edge to distract the creature. With that, he can easily pierce its neck with the sword. However, the attack doesn’t kill it. Even so, he imagined that could happen with the original Lich. Bilac finally appears and hits the weapon with her sword, annihilating the monster. 

After he learned how Katzo and Pencilgon defeated Wethermon’s robot, he wanted to try something similar. To his surprise, Emul suddenly falls and hits his head, leaving the player with only one HP. As they have defeated the boss, the miasma also starts going away. Finally, they go to the next city: Eighthold.

Sunraku sets a new respawn point there and says his farewells to the bunnies, as Bilac wants to repair the holy weapon and Emul would stand out. Before they leave, the bunnies tell him not to be reckless. When the door to Rabituza closes, he laughs on his own, obviously planning to be reckless.

After he buys some carrots for Emul, he goes back to the Canyon of Ancient Souls, intending to fight the Crystal Scorpions.

The Episode Review

It’s nice we are familiar enough with Sunraku that we already know what he’s planning to do. As soon as the episode introduces the Crystal Scorpions, you’re sure he’ll fight them soon. When he leaves Emul and Bilac in Rabituza, that only confirms that even more.

Another great thing about this story is how it deals with Sunraku’s strength. He defeated one of the game’s strongest monsters, so he won’t be having problems with a random monster he finds in the wild. The way it solves it is by giving him a weapon that’ll break in a few hits. It makes it sound more like a bonus challenge than an actual boss fight, which makes complete sense.

The battle isn’t all that interesting, but it’s nice to see his dynamic with Emul more and more. The first time we saw something like that was during the Mud Digger battle and that’s at the very start of the season.