天下制覇

I feel like this show just mugged me and stole my shirt.

Impressions:

Oh hey, I’m going to complain about terrible direction again. I can’t remember doing that at all recently. At least this episode fully woke me up by churning the bile so deeply in my gullet that I should probably be cordoned off as a public health hazard.

Okay, so… let’s quickly summarize this episode… we never learn why Misao had vanished, Naotaka’s living on an interdimensional battleship that’s also an Asura Machine, Misao gives up Tomo to Takatsuki who contracts with him, Tomo swats random monsters while shooting the breeze with Misao until a random boss shows up, 1st World Misao sacrifices herself to give Kurogane Mk II enough power to save world 1, the magic dildo turns Asura Cryin’s into gods, and then Tomo rejects An, everybody hops off on the yellow submarine back to world 2. One of these things is not like the others.

Am I the only one that sees a mood and pacing issue here? It feels like they had a checklist for every single thing relating to world 1 and they literally just went down it through the episode, piece by piece, marking off every single thing, and then tossing in Takatsuki and Tomo for good measure. That wasn’t even a dramatic moment either. It lasted all of about 30 seconds and consisted of a conversation that went something like:

Kanade: "I lied about my powers being gone. But it made me happy to be with you."
Misao: "You can have him if it means you’ll live."
Kanade: "Okay, wanna contract?"
Tomo: "Durrrrrrrr."

I may be paraphrasing slightly. But only slightly.

It felt like the show was ending. I mean, hell, they saved the world. After the last god only know how many weeks of "the world is ending and there’s NOTHING WE CAN DO TO STOP IT," it’s a tad anticlimatic to have the cause, solution, and execution thereof all dumped into a tiny little 7 minute span, capped off with a fight against a generic monster. Why start playing the OP as an insert song while Tomo’s effortlessly punching random monsters while he and Misao are talking about… I don’t even know, her hair or something. Could they have made that scene feel any more trivial?

And then, of course, the first thing they do is ship the GOD MODE dildo back towards the insane psychopath… who despite being sucked into the vortex too, somehow never showed up in world 1. How exactly does that work?  And what the hell was with An? Couldn’t Tomo just say "Oh, by the way, that was the other Tomo, not me. Sorry, can’t answer you." I mean, she was perfectly fine seeing Takatsuki, who had been a burial doll in world 1 for god only know how long… and didn’t even ask why she was in a coma. Is this normal for world 1? I think maybe they deserved to be eaten by the large hadron collider. Aargh, the bile’s churning again just thinking about it.

I think the thing that may have irritated me the most though, was idiot savant Misao saving the world. "If one Asura Machine isn’t strong enough… what if we use two?" "GENIUS!" It never crossed their mind to A.) Make another Hagane since they knew the first was going to get jacked by Tokiya, or B.) Recruit somebody to help them? Why not use one of the creepy shadows piloting Naotaka’s space whale? The mind boggles. Truly, painfully.

Preview:

"Hi. We’re the antagonists. We’ve been over here eating cake."