天下制覇

I think they ran out of creativity after Kotoha’s fight.

Impressions:

The seven month or so gaps between these episodes really doesn’t do the series any good. The whole Rin thing is pretty weak too and I could physically feel the bile rising in my gullet when Hime curled up in a ball and began feeling sorry for herself after Rin told them all that she hated them and the city so they shouldn’t come after her and fight anymore. Thankfully, everybody else was more intelligent and just ignored her and it only took her about three minutes to snap back out of it. That didn’t make it any less moronic though, just not as painful as it could have been.

The action wasn’t bad this time around, but it was certainly nowhere near as impressive as the Kotoha fight last time around. I mostly ripped that because it was the only time Ao was relevant in the entire OVA. There was quite a bit of it through the first two thirds at least, even if it wasn’t strung together in a nicely coherent single extractable scene. They were leaning a little too hard on the "formless and textureless black tentacles flying through the air" approach at times though. It looks less terrible when actually animated instead of CG, but it’s still incredibly generic. I also feel like I missed something somewhere. It just kind of jumps from Akina tuning the evil out of Zakuro to a long ED montage of everybody happily getting along. I don’t remember her exactly reforming at the end of the last episode before Enjin directly attack them. You’d think either of those events would be important enough to at least note instead of Hime scarfing down more ramen.

Overall though, it was a decent enough OVA. Much better than the TV series to be sure. The writing certainly could have been better focused, particularly in the meandering episode 1, and all of Rin’s angst via flashbacks is difficult at best to stomach, but at least it was stylish and put up some decent fight scenes. It’s not a compelling movie-length set of OVAs, but it’s not a bad way to pass the time either.