天下制覇

Is that the theme for this week then?

Impressions:

And the award for the most pointless insert song of the season goes to Devil Survivor 2. Yeah, maybe it’s a little early to be awarding it when we’re getting down to the ‘climaxes’ which is where bad insert songs usually rear their particularly ugly heads, but I honestly don’t think that anything’s going to be able to beat "insert song for people who have known each other for weeks formally introducing themselves to each other and deciding to officially be friends." That makes Date A Live’s date insert montages seem almost not pointless. Maybe they were trying to jar the audience with the *GASP* dead person e-mail killing all of them moments later… probably hoping that nobody noticed that those things have only had about a 25% accuracy rate over the last few weeks. And "you might die in an explosion while fighting gigantic, demigod monsters" is less of a shock than they’d like to believe. Even here, it missed a death until about two seconds before it happened and incorrectly marked others. Does it just flip a coin?

But we don’t get to dwell on that anyway because it’s flashback time for Hibiki! Because that’s what the narrative needed right then. Hibiki going to school in the past. Then again, since the demiurge of the week is a floating cocoon, maybe I shouldn’t complain. It then proceeded to unceremoniously and offhandedly kill practically the entire cast, in what we call Tipping Your Hand Entirely Too Early, like one of those Star Trek TNG episodes that begins with the Enterprise exploding. They don’t have the gall to pretend for longer than your average commercial break that anybody’s dead though. But luckily, the comic relief character was there with Mega Black Frost, screaming about friendship and the dangers of bullying with lasers, to make sure everything remained inappropriately corny. Good lord. It even took a laser blast full the face and still easily slaughtered with the Power of Friendship^tm. At least it was otherwise (and that’s a big otherwise) best executed action scene this show’s had in a very long time.