天下制覇

Complication and exposition does not equal depth.

Impressions:

Ugh. This episode practically exemplified chaff. This was about five minutes worth of content stretched and stretched and stretched out to fill up the entire week. Even the CG cars are looking worse, although that could just be general annoyance at the show on my part for spending the entire first half fighting their way in and then pulling some horrible "Now we must fight with some random arbitrary nonsense have you drive around for eight minutes to stretch things out even more before we just go right back to throwing fireballs at each other." Good lord, show. You have a kidnapped girl and an evil Italian vampire werewolf. You can afford to just stick with that as the motivation for… well… every part of this arc. And I’m fairly sure that everybody knows what a golem is. And if they didn’t, could probably guess it when the giant stone thing appeared. Explaining that the giant animated stone statue is a giant animated stone ‘doll’ just annoys it. And me.

All I can hope is that a second episode in a row of little more than talking heads means that they’ve been saving everything up for the big final fight in this otherwise terrible arc, but I imagine it’s far more likely that the honeymoon’s just over. They tried a little bit with the animation and Erica’s fighting in places, but far far too little and always against the pointless grunts… even when the evil Italian werewolf was apparently standing twenty feet away, staring at them. Honestly. He transformed about three minutes from the end of the episode and after transforming, literally vanished from the rest of the episode. In the middle of a fight against him. Sigh. Direction.