天下制覇

Don’t mess with her tone.

Impressions:

As much as I like this show, this episode had some production issues. The first two minutes after the OP were all but unanimated and in the case of the "what’s the defining feature of each other" joke, ripped wholesale from the source with just voices added. There were also quite a few animation irregularities (animation stuttering for example) that came and went through the rest of the episode. There was one particularly egregious mistake where they apparently forgot to include a voice sample. Nozaki’s mouth was moving, the camera was focused on her, but… there was just sound whatsoever.

Despite that, this was still a pretty decent episode, if even more irreverent in the latter going than usual. I wish Kisaragi’s dream sequence had been a lot shorter, or maybe that they hadn’t shown one of the last parts of it in the preview for last week. It sort of ruins the joke of the dream within a dream within a dream when you spend the entire time knowing about the last iteration. The first half was more focused on colors in general and then tones specifically. Everybody talked about what colors they thought they were and what that meant, and then we did a very rapid shift through all the characters presenting all the different types of tones without even pretending to maintain any kind of cohesion. That’s fine for the most part, but between the almost 8 minute dream(s) sequence and that, this episode felt a bit more like a run-by mugging than they usually do.

Preview:

Tie-dye and razor blades.