天下制覇

Hondam! Take off!

Impressions:

Let’s get the bad out of the way. The yappity yappity yappity was as boring as usual. Ieyasu and Shingen respect each other, great. That was a five minute conversation that you can probably skip. It was funny to see Shingen causing earthquakes by planting his axe in the ground and such, but until the battle started, you may as well take a nap. The start was nice, with explosions and hurricanes everwhere. I appreciate manly posing and shouting out your attack names slightly less than as much as the next guy. Suddenly giving Yukimura some war-style angst though? So what if you just killed that nameless soldier’s brother? You’ve slaughtered the greater population of Memphis by this point, don’t start whining about it now.

Once Tadakatsu Honda Hondam showed up, the rest of the episode was pretty awesome. His take-off sequence and jet packs were so deliciously over the top, and while his fights weren’t animated as well as some of the earlier stuff, they were still rather well done and featured the first three man teamup of Shingen, Yukimura, and Sasuke to fight him. At the same time, Masamune was having his own fight against Nagamasa, and while that did have a lot of yelling and explosions, it was more of the "cover the screen with energy and then things explode" variety than anything particularly sensical… even for this series.

Nobunaga’s plan was your standard backstab. It was amusing to watch Masamune just stand there while bullets bounced off his head, but since Nagamasa is still apparently still alive next week, it lost a little bit of its impact thanks to the preview. I had hoped they’d shoot his irritating wife too, but no such luck.

It’s also interesting to note that apparently Hondam’s ambidextrous with his drill lance.

Edit:
As another amusing sidenote, it’s come to my attention that apparently the Japanese are watching us watch them, and given that there are 12,000 clickthroughs from that site to the OP, there are a lot of them reading translated snippets of our half-insane Basara ramblings. That’s a somewhat chilling thought.

Mobile Suit Hondam

Preview:

Ieyasu riding Shingen is much more disturbing than when he rides Hondam.