天下制覇

At least Natalia’s in the party, finally.

Impressions:

Ahhhh… the factory… because one useless crappy dungeon with a giant crappy spider at the end of it is worth chewing up half an episode. They spent as much time in this piece of junk as they did at Choral. That’s just… sad. Pretty much every scene in there was new, especially At least they spent minimal time lighting buckets of oil on fire. I was rather curious how they were going to handle Luke’s first encounter with Asch since it’s one of the animated cutscenes in the game. They changed that a bit too. Luke was just concerned for his boy toy, Ion and didn’t feel any strange feeling from Asch before charging in. The scene here made a little more sense though. There was literally a batallion of soldiers wandering around in the game before Asch and Sync ran off.

Anyway, a rather disappointing episode mostly for its relatively languorous pace and how pathetic the action was, especially the Abaddon and Asch fights. They seriously could have/should have just used animation from the game and the Asch/Luke fight would have been better. As for the Abaddon, Luke, Jade, and Guy just jumped at it, slashes, and then it fell over… and then they shoehorned in Jade’s Contamination Effect from a sidequest they skipped either. Hopefully they do a little bit better with the Sync and Largo fight next week on the (first) trip through Zao.

As for the added stuff… eh. I don’t like cutesying up Tear, but I hate Tear in general. The Natalia stuff was alright, but she really gets the short end of the stick through the story in just about every way possible, so I’m not sure if I’m a fan of eventually crushing her even more. Maybe they’ll be nicer to her this time around though. Still, with the revelation about Luke and Asch all of probably two or three episode away, that just seems like wasted time. Who knows though, maybe they’ll significantly rewrite Asch a bit. It’d certainly help to make him not look even more spoiled and immature than Luke.

Preview:

After a week of one dungeon, we hit all of Zao, Chesedonia, and Deo next week.