天下制覇

And non-killer tomatoes.

Sword Dance was a better episode than the last couple, mainly because A.) It had a mini-boss which was slightly larger than the regular zombies, so put up an actual fight, and B.) One of them was looking like he was going to have a heroic death, but then the skies literally opened and another bishie descended from the heavens to, just like episode 1, ruin any hope of that. I think I'm pretty solidly done there.

Impressions:

Yeesh. About 80% of this episode was, even for this show, particularly imbecilic padding. Let's visit a tomato farm. And fight some random noise there. And then Tits McGee just teleports away. Eventually, after more goddamned tomato talk, we get pretty much right back to where we ended last week, with the main three in Emo Form, one-shotting the 'super' noise while the antagonists look on from a nearby building. Except this time, instead of going "This is the perfect time to fight," they transform and actually fight. Eighteen goddamned minutes into the episode. In some of the goddamned stupidest costumes imaginable, and this is in a show where one character regularly transforms into a wheel. One of them uses a giant kendama and looks like she's now three quarters shoulderpad, another is basically the same except now has five times as much hair, and the one with the tits and no underwear is now in a bikini with sleeves, so may actually have more skin covered than before. Then, after one-shotting each of their protagonist counterparts, which as we all know, is the best way for action scenes to go, they all gasp in horror as some guy in a suit shows up, strips naked, and nukes everything as everyone teleports/runs away.

So still kind of a mess, especially on the antagonist front. Granted, I'd much rather have a randomly stripping nuke happy bastard than Dr. Evil and his ten thousand melodramatic facial twists, but after all the goddamned tomato horsecrap, another round of people one-shotting everything and then being one-shot in return and then fleeing before they're one-shot in return return is really phoning it in. Nobody even puts up the slightest bit of fight. This is not satisfying in the slightest. It's just author declaration that The Stakes Have Been Raised, because… uh… shut up, they just are. The fight is not in the winning or the losing, but the fight. Losing without a struggle is just as terrible as winning without one.

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