天下制覇

Thankfully, she didn’t have a super ultimate true form.

Impressions:

Well, it wasn’t a split version or whatever of Athena, just Metis. Master of the red ridiculous hat. I expected a little more than that. And she had multiple more forms to transform through as the episode went. Plus there was also Godou’s requisite "Kiss everybody in turn" scene to defeat her which made the climax of the fighting far less impressive than Godou struggling to get his powers back in check earlier. Well, I guess that’s nothing terribly new since his ultimate abilities rely on exposition and CG swords, but still. After she transformed once, she literally stopped attacking entirely. And still had another transformation to go. Metis literally just floated there the entire time she was in her second ‘undefeatable’ true form and watched them all kiss him, gasping with each new power upgrade until Athena was spat back out of her thanks to being pierced repeatedly and she went Super Goddess II or whatever that was. She didn’t do anything there either. Also note that Mariya wasn’t even good enough to get his erection swords up. Lily turned them blue. I’m not sure what to read into that.

So yeah, it was a tad nonsensical/rushed and aside from the flash-back laden affair last week, really not particularly different from any of the previous arcs, and nobody really did anything of particularly note. It could have certainly been a worse ending and there was some nice action in it here and there, but the big climactic moment was an ugly speedline mess against a character who had spent literally the last five minutes and multiple transformations being a bystander in her own fight.

Final Thoughts:

After a fairly poor opening episode, this ended up being a surprisingly decent action show. It could be improved in nearly every way, mind you. Uneven budgeting, excessive exposition, characters not developed all that well, mediocre direction, and Mariya’s entire arc was fairly poor, and the list goes on. At the same time though, it kept things light enough and moving quickly enough to pass over a lot of that. The characters were shallow but (mostly) easy enough to watch because nobody ever got melodramatic, (seriously) insecure, or angsty over anything. The action usually didn’t quite get there for the big moments at the ends of arcs, but was usually fairly solid for the incidental scenes leading up to it. Etc. While it didn’t do much greatly, it kept itself from doing more really badly. That is assuming that all the overtly corny ‘kissing’/sex scenes were on purpose though, something that I’m not entirely confident in saying.

Much like Nobuna then, I wouldn’t have minded if this kept going on for a while longer, even though there aren’t really any big moments in it that I can look back on and point to as great moments in the show. As far as the magical fighting girlfriend shows go, it’s solidly in the upper echelon. Granted, the billions of those in existence make that a somewhat vacuous statement, but it’s not a bad action show in its own right, especially in a genre where ‘action’ often means "two men staring at each other for 8 minutes while explaining each other’s powers and motivations then some speedlines and stills."