天下制覇

Stabbings aren't what they used to be.

Symphogear is off this week. They're airing I believe some dumb broadcast of one of the 2016 concerts instead.

Impressions:

Definitely much stronger on the character focus this week, which helped immensely, at least within this episode itself. We can ignore the three or four fights that were left hanging from last week… and the week before. They're probably all fine anyway. I'm not going to say the same for the story beats it went through though, and especially not all characters who straight up tanked super ultimate omega doom attacks from point blank, and/or being stabbed through the gut by weapons the size of a small kayak. Yeah, when magic is involved, there's always some stretching of that, but when you have everybody and their brother abritraily shaking off super nukes, it lowers the quality of all future stabbings/super nukes, especially when so much less would've gotten you to the same place. Granted, they didn't dwell too much on either, and kept Rider's response to a short, but still eyerolling "You'll pay for that!" With 'that' being stabbing someone who just stabbed you in the back after telling them to stop stabbing you.

It also, of course, had to have dumb flashbacks which fed into transformation sequences, which fed into everybody reacting to the transformation sequence. All of that would be how they frittered away the last third of the episode before another screen-filling explosion to close things out. Okay, so there was some pretty half-assed action in there too. Not quite rapid fire stills, but not that far off either. Definitely not the kind of choreographed elaborate martial arts that qualifies in my book as eyecandy. More like people zipping on and off the screen to clash. And then exploding. Because maybe THIS time, unlike the last fifteen, the explosion will mean something.