As someone who is currently playing two gacha games -- Fate/Grand Order and Arknights -- episode four resonates particularly strongly with me.
Arknights is very much kinder with its lottery rates than FGO, and has what appears to me to be a more ethical approach to its revenue model: It has a "pity" system that progressively increases the drop rate of rare characters if you go for a long enough spell without getting one.
Arknights also appears to focus more on getting players to buy cosmetic "skins" for characters rather than tempting players to spend more and more actual money to acquire characters. FGO, on the other hand, literally mocks players for not spending more, via its spoof manga spinoff.
Long story short, it can be a dangerously addictive game genre, and one has to exercise a good amount of discipline and self-control, or the spending will get completely out of hand. I'm of the opinion that some of these games are getting very close to requiring gambling regulations.
Back on point, Odd Taxi continues to fascinate. Many have pointed to Durarara as an earlier example of a similar non-linear narrative structure -- I'm yet to watch that older show, though it's long been on my watch list. Non-linear narratives are relatively rare in anime, I gather, but they have a long pedigree in film, most recently in the movies made by Quentin Tarantino. So, Pulp Fiction is one of the first things that pop to mind when I watch Odd Taxi.
It'll be very intriguing to see how everything ties together in the end.