天下制覇

That’s the only thing that would have made that scene better.

Impressions:

Well, I’ve sort of begun tuning out the longwinded exposition altogether, and that’s what the majority of the first half was, so I’ll admit that I’m not really 100% clear on what exactly Aur was really up to. Something about using Deep Blood and that he used to be associated with Index. Whatever. It doesn’t really matter. He made a gun that turned into other guns. I don’t think I’ve seen that since Trigun. But wait, there’s more. Then he made a gun that shoots swords. That had the unfortunate side effect of cutting off Touma’s arm and making him go berserk, so he combined both of his tricks and turned his gun that shoots swords into many guns that shoot swords and then dual wielded them. How boss is that?

The action scenes in general for this episode were… while not particularly impressive from a technical front, very well executed. I absolutely adored Touma exploding the car, and Aur flaying Stiyl was a pretty nice touch too. Music and framing was excellent as Touma went berserk and he really sold it through his voice too. I’m actually a little surprised they got away with that since it was pretty gruesome looking, apparent illusion or not. On that note, they didn’t really censor Touma’s lost arm, perse, but they just made sure that the framing always kept the stump slightly offscreen while he leaked blood all over the nice floor before an EVIL DRAGON jumped out (well, was imagined out) of it and ate the baddie. So really, as long as you sort of tune out the exposition about a character who is now dragon chow, a very solid episode all around. Perhaps even the first and only one of this arc.

What’s really really important though, is that we get to return to the railgun next episode, along with I believe the next major villain. Bring on the Clone Saga!

Preview:

Zappy zappy!