天下制覇

And yet, this was nowhere even close.

Impressions:

By all rights, I should complain about all the ways they screw up or are inconsistent with the time stop powers yet again, but I think I’ll just talk about the production of this episode instead. Mainly because there was little to no actual plot this week. We’re back to where we were two weeks ago, complete with Dia wrapped up inside Tama. Ascouer, Q-Fy and the original era duo combined their powers to form Voltron. Or something. It was literally over in about three minutes. "Hey, go stop that exploding thing." "Okay!" The less I have to hear of that horrid harpy Hirano and the four of them spouting off strange noises, the better. There’s seriously took a moment in the middle of the planet exploding just to cram in Lumiere saying that a girl should be elegant, Eclair (and Lumiere) saying "Ta-dah" and Ascouer and Q-Fy replying with "Pagyuu." I’m all for non-T&A fanservice, but this was just painful.

So, at any rate, the animation was a little bit curious this week. I’d say that it was overall mostly better, but the very long flashback that we’ve seen before in the middle and some really embarrassing moments in the space battles made it clear that they have definitely not been saving up for this. Scenes flitted between entire armada’s worth of laser fire just being two blinking frames, like the whole thing was just a Christmas decoration, and Saphir’s ship and the Mistral flitting around shooting cluster bombs, etc. I was also pretty disappointed with how quickly and easily Rubis, Tama, and Dia went down against Saphir of all people. Q-Fy was nearly holding her own against Saphir back in episode 5 or so with nothing but mini-grenades. Now that she can stop time, Saphir’s suddenly even more dangerous?

Preview:

Wasn’t this the preview from two weeks ago?