天下制覇

This episode physically caused me pain.

Impressions:

Aren’t you ending soon Kekkaishi? Don’t you want to at least put your best foot forward here? Couldn’t you try to not suck? Last episode was good! Why did this episode have to be so terrible?

Alright, fine… I can sit through more awful generic Kaguro/Yoshimori talking; it’s the longest conversation they’ve had since Kaguro first showed up at Karasumori some six months ago. That’s the first eight minutes. Then Tokine and Sen pull Yoshimori aside and try to tell him how to fight intelligently by catching Kaguro’s swords in a semi-permeable barrier, but Yoshi’s clearly too stupid for such things, so back to the fight of brute force vs brute force. Then Kaguro leaps off the building to attack. This happens at 11:43 in. A full minute later, Sen steps in to intercept the same attack by holding discarded blade pieces in his fingertips. Leaving aside the fact that Sen thinks he can take the full force of someone swinging a sword with his fingertips, Kaguro has now spend 60 seconds sailing through the air in slow motion. Kaguro doesn’t even hit for another 17 seconds, and continuing the slow motion movement, there’s another ten seconds of staring at the impact before Yoshimori goes nuclear. From there, it takes another two minutes reaction shots before Kaguro dissolves.

Yeah, they just killed the (second) best character on the show with a random "Yoshimori gets mad" attack. That was the climax of Kaguro. A five minute slow motion long jump ending in a giant shiny Kaguro-dissolving light. Why, Sunrise? Why?

Blah blah, rest of episode is Yoshi passing out with his uberbarrier still up. Masamori tries to break in, and Tokine thinks that she can pass through it like she did with his barrier in the previous episode ending with a shot of Tokine looking like she’s actually the unholy child of Dhalsim. I think they forgot to pay attention to perspective there.

Seriously though… what the hell was that? Bah… BAH!

Preview:

Byakku escapes with the Princess, and Tokine hugs Yoshimori.