天下制覇

  

You get nothing. Just a big sloppy kiss from dead mom.

I had meant to mention it yesterday, but for the interested, Kamiradi got a ton of promotional stuff posted, along with a relatively (extremely relatively) slick OP vid.

Impressions:

I don’t like much what they did with this episode. They were going for all is lost but Leon barely had a character or even ambitions to begin with. If they had shown Leon being revenge obsessed to the exclusion of other things any point before this, or with a real hard-on for his dead mother that he never met, or obssessed with having super powers, or really anything besides just “the armor used to be hard to control,” I might have been able to see it, but his dark side berserker turn came from the shocking reveal that his mother was in horrible pain when she… burned to death… and then skeleton incest. It also makes me wonder what the point of those parts where he goes to the moon to visit his vampire friend were. Are they still “That Time of the Month” buddies? It’s also hard to think that Mendoza’s really dead, particularly when they make it a point of going “That was sure easy and anticlimactic.” He was swallowed by his own monster out of nowhere and then simply disappeared. His apprentice is also still around after all, although if she does as much in the second half as Girl Alchemist has in the first, then his plans are pretty much screwed. At least it was eventfulish though. I’ll take that over the flashbacks of last week.

I also don’t really know where they go from here while killing time waiting for Mendoza’s inevitable return. I mean, I presume he’ll bum around, some family will take him in, and he’ll be called back to action by… whatever, but he didn’t really have much of a character to start with, so there’s not a big arc to be had unless they’re going to start rewriting him entirely. Not an entirely unwelcome prospect, but I really don’t want to sit through any number of episodes of him angsting about.