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Eden’s Zero Chapter 35 Review/Recap

My readers, I will be blunt about this: I don’t know what’s going on right now. By all intents, it looks like Homura’s turned on the crew of the Edens Zero, and we still don’t know why. At the same time, I have seen Mashima do this kind of thing before, so until I see actual proof, I won’t believe this to be an actual betrayal. For now, though, the recap

Recap

As the Edens Zero crew is fighting the monsters, Homura goes to the forest to speak with Jamiroff. He’s waiting for his army to kill the townsfolk and bring him the players so he can kill them, and begs to let her work with him.

Meanwhile, Shiki takes the unwilling Hermit back to the town, using is Gravity Ether Gear to fend off the monsters. Hermit’s convinced that Shiki somehow stole Ziggy’s powers, because she doesn’t trust humans. She even goes so far as to say they don’t have a soul. Shiki says that while some may not (i.e. heartless monsters), since Hermit was Ziggy’s friend, she’s his friend.

As for everyone else, they’re holding their own. Rebecca’s doing her Elie-gunslinger thing, but Pino and Weisz are at a major disadvantage since they can’t use their powers. There’s just too many monsters for them to deal with, though, and they start to move on the NPC’s.

That’s when a monster boss, the Shinobi Troll, that the crew met earlier jumps in to protect the people, saying its his job as an NPC. Shiki then returns, and then trounces the mosnters.

Jamiroff finally shows up on the battlefield, and orders his army to slaughter everyone. The Shinobi Troll (nicknamed Shino-Chan) uses himself as a living shield, but is filled full of arrows and falls unconcsious. Or dead. I can’t tell really.

Just then, another arrow’s aimed at the girl that Shino-Chan was protecting, and Shiki takes the shot into this arm. To everyone’s shock, it’s revealed that the person who shot him was Homura herself, who coldly declares that they aren’t friends.

Review

Okay, what the heck is going on here? What is Homura really after by betraying everyone? I know that it has something to do with wanting to meet Drakken Joe, but what could her motivation be?

We know that Homura has Valkyrie’s Ether Sword, so she either wasn’t lying about being her student, or she stole it from Valkyrie somehow. Either way, we still know too little about who Homura is.

As for her betrayal, the reason I’m not convinced it’s genuine is because Mashima pulled this stunt before in Fairy Tail. In one of the arcs near the end of its run, it looked one of the main heroes, Gray Fullbuster, had gone over to the dark side by joining a Dark Guild and severing his ties with his friends. Turns out, he was working undercover in order to stop said guild’s plot to slaugther an entire city.

Working on that logic, and considering how Mashima seems to be reusing a lot of his old material, he could be doing the same thing with Homura. Or it could be genuine. But if she ends up joining them for real because Shiki gives her some “power of friendship” speech, I will be so mad. It’s an overused trope!

What I did like about this chapter is Hermit’s remark about humans not having any souls. It’s both a reversal on the statement that robots don’t have souls or hearts, and a very real represenation of how some people can act. I’m not joking, humanity has done some pretty nasty stuff throughout recorded history. And there are jerks that act like they have no soul. But there are also plenty of people who care about each other and are good and kind.

I don’t know what Hermit went through, but I am very eager to learn about it. That could take a while, though! Something tells me that next chapter is about explaining Homura’s betrayal.

I Give This Chapter 3/5

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Eden’s Zero Chapter 34 Review/Recap

Well, things just keep getting crazier and crazier in this chapter of Eden’s Zero. Hermit doesn’t trust humans, for reasons that’ll be revealed later, and now I’m not sure if we can trust Homura.

On top of that, remembering what Hermit said about humans triggers Shiki’s memories of the robots of Granbell and how they said they hate humans.

As the readers, we know that the robots were lying in order to get Shiki to leave Granbell before they went offline for good. Otherwise, he’d be stuck there forever. It was necessary, but I still feel bad about it. I hope Shiki learns the truth one day.

At the moment, though, the crew of Edens Zero seems to have much bigger problems. At that moment, an army of monsters appears outside the village!

And they’re being led by… a talking bird man? What the heck?

This Giron says that he’s working on behalf of that psychotic monster Jaimoff and he’s going to kill every last NPC in town and take it over. Then, Jamioff will kill the monsters so he can level up and gain experience.

Shiki, however, is having none of that.

For a few moments, it looked like Shiki was going to curb-stomp the monster army, but then Happy points out that some of the flying monsters are headed towards the hill where Hermit’s sulking. So Shiki runs off to save her, whether she wants it or not.

As for the rest of the group, they have to face the monster army by themselves. To make things worse, Homura ran off again. According to her conversation with Jesse, she has nothing against the crew of Edens Zero, but they’ve “done their part”.

Strange Development

I still cannot figure what Homura’s real motives. I know that she has some ulterior motive for helping out Shiki back on Guilst, and since she has Valkyrie’s sword, I can assume her connection to Valkyrie of Edens Zero is genuine.

Regardless, the crew of Edens Zero is at a disadvantage. Pino can’t use her EMP generation inside Digitalis or it will wreck everything, and Weisz can’t use his Machina Maker. Right now, Rebecca and Happy are the only line of defense.

Most people would say it seems hopeless, but this is a shonen manga. They’ll pull out some trump card somehow; that’s how shonen’s like to work. And I think I know what it could be. Maybe this fight will be what lets Rebecca master her dormant Ether Gear.

Back at Hermit’s hill, Hermit was about to just let herself be killed by the monsters, but Shiki jumps in and saves her at the last second. The chapter ends at that moment, but I hope that this will be the start of Hermit growing to trust Shiki. At the least, we’ll learn what made Hermit hate humans so much in the first place.

This chapter didn’t seem quite as interesting as last week’s, in my honest opinon. To be fair, though, the previous chapter had a lot of twists, so maybe I’m still trying to wrap my head around that. What happens next is your guess as much as it is mine, guys! I hope to see you guys next week for another episode of Edens Zero!

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