The Price of Smiles Episode 1 Review
Yuuki is a young Princess with dead parents but she’s bubbly and sweet and determined to make everyone smile (so typical anime character really). She’s aided by Joshua, the standard childhood friend who also happens to be in the military, and some cliche stern looking woman whose name I didn’t catch. Realistically, this one has pretty standard written all over it.
That said, there’s something fairly enthusiastic about this first episode and the way it commits to following Yuuki and Joshua around in their daily life before dropping the reveal of what is going on outside of the kingdom after the credits definitely deserves some attention. Not to mention, while I made fun of each of the characters for being pretty standard tropes, they are at least fun ones who work well together.
I went into The Price of Smiles with practically no information and really I was pleasantly surprised. While Yuuki might get a bit tiresome, I’m kind of hoping her eyes are going to get open to reality at some point and that will be something to see. Meanwhile the rest of the cast could all potentially be pretty interesting and the training robot fight we had in this episode was certainly entertaining enough.
While this one isn’t an instant ‘must watch’ it certainly has enough potential. I’m fairly curious as to what is going on with the military side of this story and I would like to see Yuuki’s development over the course of the series so I’m looking forward to sticking this one out. After I watched the episode I read the MAL synopsis and apparently we have another character coming that I don’t think we’ve seen yet so I wonder what they’ll add to the mix. While I’m not saying rush out and watch it, this first episode has promise and I guess we’ll see how it goes.
Or, use one of my product affiliate links.
DARLING IN THE FRANXX 1/7 SCALE PRE-PAINTED FIGURE: ZERO TWO
- Episode 1: Smile and the World Smiles With You – Maybe Not
- Episode 2: The Will To Keep a Smile Shining
- Episode 3: You Mean There’s People on the Other Side of a War?
- Episode 4: Rare Case When Naive Heroism Doesn’t Win The Day
- Episode 5: The Desperation of Both Sides in a War
- Episode 6: Where Will Yuuki Find Her Smile Now?
- Episodes 7 – 9: You Can Only Smile For So Long
- Episodes 10 – 11: Not About Who is Right, Only Who Is Left
- Episode 12: Bringing Back Smiles Through Over-Simplification
- Images from: Egao no Daika. Dir. T Suzuki. Tatsunoko Production. 2019.