天下制覇

Need something to put in the portfolio, huh?

Impressions:

I guess you could take the perspective that they're finally putting some effort into animating the fights again. Of course, I'd be more impressed if they were doing it themselves instead of outsourcing it to other people in a completely different style from any episode prior. Also, if it didn't keep hitting the pause button to have these personalityless ninnies blather endlessly at each other. It starts out, promising a fight, then gets distracted into two people pontificating at each other. Gets briefly back to the action… until one of them literally just walks off to a large room to pontificate at MidBoss4. Which is also the 'cliffhanger' for the episode some ten minutes later because we have to return to MidBoss2 and MidBoss3 (vs MidBoss1). Oh, and while we're at it, the MidBoss2 fight is about 90% explosions and posing inside explosions.

To summarize then, essentially the same as last week, except with guest artists. Not the utter unanimated talkfest that most episodes of this show have been, but the plot still only inched forward from one midboss fight, and even with someone's animators showing up to work, it still managed to fit in plenty of standing still, prattling heads, sometimes even inside of explosions. None of these characters matter. Hell, Shirou, the big bad himself, is just off literally in a corner doing… something… that may have… some kind of consequences. But it's all in the abstract, and the greatest evil he's done thus far is… having someone else poison a few self-declared jackasses offscreen? I'm not sure there's any reasonable hope for anything better though. It's far too late for the show to solve its core dramatic/plot/character problems, which undercut whatever kind of fancy animation it may bring to the table. Maybe next week though, the sound mixer can get his act together.

Next Episode:

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