Episode starts out with Ruby visiting her mom's grave saying what happened/going to happen before tournament. Kind of makes you feel like it's a Monty tribute too.
Then suddenly cuts to tournament action on the giant floating structure with team RWBY of Beacon vs team ABRN of Haven. How the festival structure works is through the rounds it goes from the entire team, then duo, then single fights as you advance. The battlefield environmental structure sections is decided randomly from ice, forest, etc before fight begins. The areas also seems to have sources of Dust that can help with your weapons that hunters/huntresses can use to their advantage. Your eliminated from the fight either from having your aura level go too low from sustained damage [think it was below 15% or something] or go out of bounds. In the 4 vs 4 team fight the winner is decided when the entire opponent team is eliminated. Not surprisingly team RWBY wins flawlessly where Blake takes out one member via too much damage/ring out and Yang takes out the other three [with the help of Weiss who froze two of them in a giant snowball that was slowly heading to out of bounds which forced the last remaining member to stop it and Blake who gave Yang a momentum rubber-band boost] via ring out from a punch when the remaining three were bunched together.
After the match RWBY goes find a place to eat, but then Ruby is called by Emerald about Ruby "dropping" [Emerald likely pickpocket her as excuse to talk to her] her wallet and returned it to her. Emerald keeps up her innocent facade with Ruby and haves conversation. Conversation goes from Ruby asking how Emerald's team [Cinder's group of Cinder, Emerald, Mercury, and "mysterious" 4th member that are posing as Haven students] did which shows a brief flashback of their fight earlier dominating. Interesting moment was it showed the black hair pigtailed girl from the trailer being the 4th member and just as she sadistically walks over to a knocked down opponent her green eyes goes from this...
....to this just before she stomps on opponents head. So yeah disguised Neo is 4th member of that team. Conversation also goes to Emerald casually asking what duo has RWBY decided which the team said they decided via vote it would be Ruby and Weiss. Ruby invites Emerald to go eat with them, but politely declines making the excuse she has to to keep an eye on her 'socially awkward' teammates. When they separate Emerald ditches the facade as she meets up with Mercury and feels disgusted with how "happy" they are. Interesting to note Mercury got a new VA for this season which is Yuri Lowenthal. Mercury asks if she got the intel and said yes it's the "heiress" and the "bimbo" fighting in the duos.
RWBY finds a place to eat that is owned by that one old guy who seems to have a job everywhere. Yang/Ruby gets a big bowl of noodles, Weiss gets one too awkwardly, and Blake gets a bowl of fish. Being the rich girl she is, Weiss offers to pay for the meal for everyone with her credit card, but is surprised when it was declined.
Then team JNPR shows up with Pyrrha offering to pay and eats with RWBY. RWBY and JNPR are both full after the meal and talk about when JNPR is starting their match. JNPR's mood is mixed with Pyrrha being optimistic, Lie being Lie [now being voiced by Monty's brother], Jaune being pessimistic when Nora joked about his usefulness, and Nora going from excited to sad at the possibility of them losing and the exaggerated consequences [although it's interesting to note that she mentions that both her and Lie has no parents or a home to go to which I'm not sure she is joking about] that will follow. Announcement happens where JNPR needs to go to the arena for their upcoming fight and RWBY wishes them luck. [defeat flag?]
JNPR fight is about to start as RWBY and Cinder's group prepare to watch as spectators. Apparently Cinder's group reflects that this fight might still be entertaining even if they
know who will win [another lose flag?]
. Either this means someone got sabotaged, they are confident on how much more skilled one team is over the other, or they are just that arrogant. I know last season Cinder's group got intel about Pyrrha so that might come into play? Either way the episode ends as JNPR's fight begins against some other team [don't remember name and which academy].
Then the new OP plays. No next episode preview of course.
All in all pretty good premier for the season. I didn't think there would be this much action right out the gate and there seems to be even more action soon. Had nice amount of comedy, action, and serious moments. Animation didn't seem to suffer. They used stills rather then models for a scene where it showed all those people watching the tournament on television, but besides that it's not S1 bad where it's shadows/silhouettes and more comparable to S2 improvements which is nice considering the stadium has a ton of spectators. Hopefully JNPR doesn't lose this early especially against a likely fodder team. Kind of want them to go at it against RWBY eventually since the food fight didn't really show how well they would go against each other.