天下制覇

Oh, Japan.

As noted in Vividred, broadcast for all of Thursday’s shows will be delayed next week too.

Impressions:

Ooookay, the show’s gone a bit off the rails again. Been a while since it did that. Frankly, it’s better than doing nothing at all, which is what it was ‘excelling’ at for a while now. The first half was them trying to get Sasami out of her funk, leading to the rather anticlimactic return of Tsurugi. Also, Sasami herself going all walrus shaped. Which was followed by an extended dream sequence/flashback because apparently we’re not done with her mother yet. Or just as likely, setting up this other girl, I guess, although if they’re trying to amp her menace factor by making Sasami’s mother job to her in the past, it’s not working.

That doesn’t mean that there weren’t the usual budget woes either. They apparently blew everything on the trippy "breaking into Sasami’s room" and "here’s some insane-as-hell-guy" sequences, because the animation all but stopped after them. It was especially bad at the very end once the rock thing showed up. It’s like they were just missing 2/3rds of the frames every time it moved, but the last third of the episode was little more than a long slideshow. Oh well. Still better than a lot of the show’s been.

Preview:

If you’re reading this, it means that I forgot to change the template.