天下制覇

That’s how you can tell it’s extra melodramatic.

Impressions:

I think someone might’ve slipped some bleach into the director’s drink this week. The first half was fairly unremarkable, aside from Katsuragi’s past flashbacked out of literally nowhere and with no connection to absolutely anything. Similarly immediately forgotten too. It looked like someone was also messing with the frame-speed controls during it too. The second half, meanwhile, looked like someone spilled paint over the backgrounds half the time. Or maybe they just changed everything halfway to speedlines so when the fighting started and the speedlines did take over, it’d be less obvious. Too haphazard to really be able to call a style, but too nonsensical to really go without comment.

That said, the second half was a lot closer to the low end action that I’ve been hoping the show would be getting back to. Given the still not-so-great budget, I do think they’ve spread themselves a little thin. A little more focus, as always, could have turned five somewhat generic abortive fight introductions into one or two meaningful and slicker ones, especially still this relatively early in the show. Or at the very least, tuck the seemingly main ones by effort (Homura vs Asuka and Katsuragi vs Hikage) at the end instead of smack in the middle. It’s still closer to what I wanted to see from the show at least, so… boffo for that?

Preview:

Battles in pink land.