Chained Soldier Episode 6 Review

Mato Exhibition Match Round 2

Chained Soldier Episode 6 covers the second round of the Mato Exhibition Match. This is the fight between Shushu Suruga of the 7th Squad and Sahara Wakasa of the 6th Squad. Unfortunately, this is also the final round, since the exhibition match gets cut short.

In the first round, we had Himari vs. Yachiho Azuma, which makes sense since they’re sisters and rivals. The final round was supposed to be Kyouka Uzen vs. Tenka Izumo since their the commanders of their squads. But, that doesn’t mean the Shushu vs. Sahara match is simply the leftover pairing.

Both Shushu and Sahara are hand-to-hand combatants. They need to get up close and personal to fight with their abilities. So, this is the martial arts round of the match. And, to start, both girls agree not to use their abilities. That doesn’t last very long, though.

We already know what Shushu’s ability is and how it works. So, there’s not too much to say about that. But, what I will say is that I would have liked to see her swap between sizes on the fly. Like, going from giant when attacking to tiny when dodging.

Sahara’s ability is the new one. I’ll go into more detail about it in the next section. But, for now, the basics are that she chooses a time limit for her ability to be active. And, the shorter the time limit, the stronger her ability is.

What is this ability that she’s making stronger? It’s simply her physical strength. So, even when Shushu is in her giant form, Sahara can hit her hard. This is exactly why I would have liked to see Shushu use her Paradigm Shift in a more dynamic way. While giant, she was a sitting duck.

Crazy Sheep Sahara

The name of Sahara Wakasa’s ability is Crazy Sheep. However, the subtitles I had called it Mad Sheep, which is pretty strange. We literally hear the characters say Crazy Sheep in English. So, I don’t know why they decided to localize it to Mad Sheep.

Anyway, as I said, Crazy Sheep is a physical enhancement ability. Sahara chooses an amount of time between 1 and 60 minutes. And, I’m assuming she has to choose whole minutes, not something like 5 minutes and 32 seconds. Her ability is then activated for that timeframe.

The shorter the timeframe she chooses, the stronger she becomes for its duration. So, choosing 60 minutes will give her a small strength boost. And, choosing 1 minute will give her an insane strength boost. But, we don’t know how this strength boost scales. Is it exponential? Linear? We don’t know.

What we do know is that she chose 3 minutes in this fight against Shushu. That turned out to be the perfect amount of time and strength for her to barely take the win. I had predicted that Sahara would win. But, I didn’t expect her victory to be by such a slim margin.

The only reason Sahara won was because of a second part of her ability. If she’s unconscious while her ability is active, she becomes even stronger. So, when Shushu knocked Sahara out, she sealed her own fate. This is what gave Sahara the power boost needed to win.

Of course, Sahara’s ability isn’t without its drawbacks. While unconscious, she becomes a berserker who doesn’t differentiate between friend and foe. Also, after her time limit runs out, she has to take a 3-minute nap. So, she’d better win the fight or have her allies ready to protect her.

What Is Tenka Cooking?

We’re most likely going to learn all about Tenka’s ability in next week’s episode. After all, each episode pretty much focuses on a single girl who’s called out in the title. But, before her ability is revealed, I want to do some theorizing about it.

My first impression was that Tenka’s ability is how she opens portals. We’ve seen her do that multiple times now. But, the more I thought about it, the more I’m not sure that’s unique to her. Don’t the other girls use portals like those to come and go from Mato?

I could be wrong. And I’m not going to go back and look at previous episodes to find out. But, I’m going to assume portals between Mato and our world aren’t unique to Tenka. What could be unique to her is creating portals between different places within Mato.

How does this explain her being able to defeat the Shuuki army single-handedly, though? We saw the Shuuki burned to death with blue fire. That appears to be due to a completely different ability, right? It could be. But, the blue flames could also be from a different region within Mato.

Mato is a weird place. Maybe there’s a sea of blue fire. And, if there is, maybe Tenka opened a portal within it, allowing the blue fire to rush out and kill the Shuuki. That’s my current theory. If it’s true, then Tenka has a pretty strong ability.

We’ll also have to wait and see if there’s a drawback associated with whatever her ability is. So far, we haven’t seen one. But, we also know that not all ability drawbacks happen immediately after an ability is used. Kyouka’s Slave ability is one example of this.

Final Thoughts

What do you think of Chained Soldier Episode 6? Were you expecting Shushu or Sahara to win their fight? Where would you rank Sahara’s ability compared to the others we know of? And, what do you think Tenka’s ability is going to end up being?

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My review of Episode 7 is available now.