天下制覇

  

I’d rather see more of the Afterschool Six than the other subcharacters.

Impressions:

The start of this episode gave me some slight hope that it might settle down a little bit and focus on the one character. I’d be more enthusiastic if he wasn’t The Angst Hidden Under His Mask though. Regardless, it was pretty much a lie. The only thing he really did for the entire rest of the episode was hallucinate that Greeny was his dead brother who was torn apart by wolves in front of him. That’s not true, but it’d be something to actually be this sulky about. The episode was more about his support theater club cast screwing around, but as the first episode to actually focus on some smaller set of characters instead of spasmatically switching to a new one every two minutes on the dot, that’s a step in the right direction. They’re noisy and hyper, but at least consistently so instead of SCREAMING RANDOM SENTENCES FOR A JOKE HA HA HILARIOUS. 

The fight at the end was also a continued step in the right direction, even if it does make for a lot of janky screencaps. Where was this joie de vivre at the start? It’d still look better if they just animated it normally instead of switching to that style (although the ink horses do work well with it), the Mario Kart balloons are still imbecilic, and tournaments remain shorthand for “writers couldn’t be assed to try,” but this is somehow actually holding its own in that department after the first episode’s utterly shameful display. Who could’ve guessed?