天下制覇

Going nowhere slowly.

Impressions:

Well, if you were hoping for nothing but a nearly word for word retelling of this arc with about 5 minutes worth of animation spread out across a 30 minute episode, then I have good news for you. For everybody else, this episode was dull to the extreme. We rehashed the whole "this isn’t Rika’s world" about three times over the course of the episode with the only real development coming at the end when it’s revealed that the shard that changed everything is the fact that Rika’s mother is Oyashiro’s incarnation instead of Rika. And it only took us 27 minutes to get there. And even during that, they reused the same animation of her mother hugging her three times in a row. Way to push the borders of OVA production quality, Deen.

It wasn’t all bad or rehashed dialogue though. Rika also beat Satoko with a chair. That was entertaining. The episode could have used more of that. There were probably also as many frames of animation used during that scene as the entire rest of the episode combined. Aside from that, it was literally 30 minutes of static talking heads, pretty much every single one of them saying "this world’s pretty good, okay?" At least next episode, where Rika actually has to make a decision and follow through on it, should be more interesting, if a bit preachy at the end.

Preview:

Dreams.