天下制覇

How lucky that they don’t need new backgrounds.

Impressions:

Apparently DxD has run out of background artists because they teleported into an exact replica of where they already were. Run that through your head a few times and think of its amazing padding capabilities. "Let’s start." "No, we need to teleport." "Okay, let’s teleport." "We’ve teleported." "Wait, this is the same place as before." "No, it is only a replica." "Oh." And then we’re 5 minutes into the episode. This was then followed with another important conversation that went basically "Okay, so we need to stay in contact." "But how!?" "Magic." "Oh, magic?" "Yes, magic." "Wow, magic!" "See? Magic." And then they slowly zoomed out on a map, which did give me enough time to ponder reasons why the old school house appeared to be smaller than the pool. All those tremendously important things that the show couldn’t have proceeded without brought us halfway through the episode.

So of course all these training episodes and the first half being a whole lot of nothing mean they’ve been saving up for the fight scenes, right? The sad thing is that I suspect the answer was indeed yes. Don’t get me wrong, the second half was about as unironically enjoyable as this show’s been since its ill-conceived inception. I chuckled when Koneko just tackled Random Girl while she was trying to trash talk. Would that all the characters did that, especially the ones fighting Motormouth. Regardless, the action was still under what Symphogear or Guilty Crown scrape together out of leftover pizza crusts and stale garlic noughts most weeks. Maybe it’s because the antagonists are basically a team of indistinct people that haven’t actually done anything. That’s not how your antagonists should work. They could toss in a few extras or forget others and I wouldn’t be any the wiser. Nobody’s buying the cliffhanger defeat at the hands of Random Woman. Let’s see some actual antagonist behavior here. Dig some stiletto heels into flesh. Kick them in the boob. Something. Generic explosions and cloth tearing doesn’t cut it. That’s been friendly fire for the last 9 weeks. And doubly so when Issei’s ‘ultimate attack’ (complete with training montage to explain it immediately after using it!) will backfire against anything with a Y chromosome. Luckily, he always has deus ex protagonist power to fall back on in case of balls.

Preview:

Gasp!