天下制覇

Lyner has PMS of the demon eye.

Impressions:

Whoa. Where’d this come from? The humor was essentially gone from this episode, but in its place was bloodshed rivaling Total Recall levels. From Ferris’ brother beheading the captive to the start, to the magic knights evil clowns cutting up Sion’s entire troop compliment to Lyner exploding heads, this was… a very bloody and intense episode. A lot of the gore was pretty censored as just chunks of black bodies on a red background, but there were certainly servered heads rolling about too. Zexcs finally managed to step up to the plate here and get both the focus and the intensity right and the episode was really good for it.

There were a few not so stellar parts. I thought that Kifa’s betrayal, as well as her whole "I suddenly hate war" schtick, and the resolution of her parts were both a little too much out of nowhere and overly heavy handed. It feels like whenever the Japanese start talking about who or what makes someone a monster, they can’t help but yank out the 100 ton cluebat. Betrayal makes me a monster, but having the EYE OF THE ALL-CONSUMING GOD OF DARKNESS HERE TO PLUNGE THE WORLD INTO ETERNAL NIGHT just makes you hot. Sure, whatever. The whole ending segment in general dragged a bit, but that’s probably just an artifact of the bloodsoaked first half that killed off most of the named cast.

Preview:

Ferris flying through the air.