天下制覇

So much shoe and sword-shoe destruction this week.

Impressions:

There were a couple moments of absolutely hilarious horrible animation around the 14-16 minute marks. I’m not talking just some misshapen art or anything, I don’t even know what happened. Probably that those were the very last scenes animated at the last second before the deadline or they just forgot to actually clean them up instead of literally waving the art around on the screen to simulate walking, or another favorite, waves her pencil over a piece of paper and writing appears. I seriously have no idea what happened there. The rest of the episode was pretty much fine, and then a few moments where the animators completely forgot what walking and writing look like.

Most of the episode wasn’t particularly interesting again otherwise though. The cliffhanger fight at the start was busted up before Tsubasa could use her sword-foot by Kazanari, who can apparently punch her sword-foot so hard that it blows up his shoes. That’s a new one, especially in a show filled with girls. Shoes usually aren’t the first thing to go. What followed was angst flashback time and then Hibiki having troubles balancing her life as well as a whole bunch more exposition on the noise, Durandal, an introduction to their manager who left about as much of an impression as a saltine, etc. Thankfully, things did pick up a bit towards the end. They brought back Hibiki’s dark/Noise side as she fought a motile bundle of grapes and took all her recent frustrations out on those poor noise. Of course, it still wasn’t enough to defeat the grape-monster. And the obligatory cliffhanger of the week was the other girl showing up in the last second to taunt them. Hopefully she’ll be something more than a punching bag to act as the actual antagonist for awhile.