I wish you could play word chain in English, but we have too many s, t, and d’s at the end of our words. (And e’s too.)
Plot synposis:
Sora and Shiro play against the highly knowledgeable, angel-like “flugel” Jibril, in a game of word chain; wagering Jibril’s library of books against their tablet full of books from another world. And not just any game of word chain, but one where any word you say causes something to materialize or dissapear within a magical simulator. Just about the most epic game of word chain ensues, which of course eventually ends with Sora and Shiro outsmarting Jibril and winning.
Thoughts:
I’m relieved that Jibril was just messing with people with her broken Japanese, and indeed turned out to be as smart as we were promised a flugel would be. Her shtick of drooling over Sora and Shiro’s tablet was funny, and the crosses she has in place of pupils is a nice touch. Not to mention it’s pretty hardcore how the flugel used to decapitate the heads of all their enemies before the ten commandments went into effect. I don’t know about sora, but I certainly wouldn’t mind make a cute angel chick orgasm by rubbing her wing. Sure, it’s not the same as touching her vagoo as he initially hoped for, but hey a virgins gotta make do with what he can get.
I can’t say I’m too knowledgeable about science or physics, so I wouldn’t know if all the atoms and atmosphere that Sora spouts on about is just the author trying to act smart (I-I’m not dumb I swear!) So just with game theory, I’m willing to trust other anime fans more knowledgeable than I when they say that it is indeed the latter. Though like I’ve said before, I’ve accepted that the games in this show are not going to be genuine battle of the wits with some actual solid logic backing them, so the game of magical word chain they played was still fun to watch. I loved the bit where Sora removes all the girls’ clothing (of course I would,) albeit the nipple-less nudity was a tad annoying. The bit where he made the whole planet vanish was a nice spectacle too, even if the science behind it might have been wonky.
Sora and Shiro end up winning because they were more knowledgeable about science than flugel was, conjuring up stuff like a hydrogen bomb, and using the distinction between “air” and “oxygen” to their advantage. Though I wonder, didn’t Jibil have the same advantage due to living in her own fantasy world, and one with plenty of spell-casting words too? But I guess the point of the games outcome was how Sora and Shiro manipulated the game with their subtle choice of words, and the downfall of Jibil was that she simply relied on her vaster expanse of knowledge, thinking that Sora and Shiro would run out of things to say before she did.
I gotta say though, it was pretty scummy of Sora to allow Steph to fall towards Disboard’s core and blow up. Even if it’s really killing and just making a super life-like simulation, that’s still making her experience what it like to have the air inside you expand and blow you up, and die. I know I’ve praised No Game No Life before for unabashedly featuring some asshole protagonists, but this sort of behavior from Sora is just detestable. You could say that he was already a detestable character for groping Steph and treating her like a dog, and I wouldn’t argue with that, but admittedly I at least found that pretty funny. But letting her die like that, and then brushing it off as no big deal , that’s where I draw a line and start to like this guy less. Maybe that’s the point, but I don’t think so.
Aside from that it was another decent episode, and I’m looking forward to seeing what Jibril will add to the show. The color palette of this show is also starting to grow on me.
Anime Is (Not) Dead 
As a physicist I was quite satisfied with the science of the episode – not perfect but not outright terrible. Honestly, I think the movie “Gravity” did worse, and that was supposed to be realistic. There were two big qualms:
1) the use of the words “mantle”, “crust” and “lithosphere”, where “lithosphere” was redundant since it actually means “crust and outer mantle”. However in the original Japanese he didn’t say “crust”, he said “outer core”, and that was a translation approximation made by Crunchyroll in order to keep the game working in English. So that gets a pass.
2) the final scene with the Coulomb force abolished. At first one would think the first consequence of such a thing should be the immediate disintegration of everyone’s body, except that it was said earlier that the game can’t kill the players DIRECTLY, so that’s actually fine. The only true issue is that with no Coulomb force, by all means, all light should disappear as well, since light is an electromagnetic wave. But I can give that a pass for the sake of the show.
Interesting. Thanks for explaining.
Thanks for the analysis. I knew something was off about the mantle/crust/lithosphere translation, glad to hear it was just crunchy being dumb and not an original error.
I would like to add up on the analysis.
Gas molecules inside one’s body exert pressure. And it is also true that a vacuum has zero pressure. It is commonly believed that when the air filled human body is exposed to a vacuum, the pressure exerting from inside the body would explode the physique from the inside out.
However, the tissues of a human body are strong enough to withstand the collision of gases from inside the body.
Instead of the body blowing up by the gas pressure inside, the gases in the respiratory and digestive system will release, not exploding the body, but simply exiting. So Steph shouldn’t have blown up when the atmosphere was removed.
However, our beloved heroes and heroines will indeed lose consciousness by the exposure of space within seconds. Not to mention we have to reluctantly admit the hideous appearances of our adorn characters when their bodies are in a vacuum.
Since a vacuum has no pressure, the water in the human body will vaporize, causing the human body to swell up due to the nonexistence of moist. So Sora, Shiro, Jibril, and Steph will lose their beautiful faces and attractive figures, replaced with bloated ones.