天下制覇

Which is like… almost every single character in this episode.

Impressions:

Time for the Majikoi mantra. "This would have been pretty cool if it wasn’t so embarrassingly bad." It seemed like the budget was inversely proportional to the importance of what was happening. More effort was spent on the cat girls hopping in to punch Issei around than his previous few minutes of ‘fighting’ the enemy Rook. And then he just punched the ground and created a giant garden of swords and killed all of them but a couple at once anyway. AoE attacks are far too overpowered in this game. Maybe instead of a dozen characters with about two minutes of screen time spread out between all of them, we could have drilled down and focused on just a few to give it more meaning, eh? Hell, Drill-sis just stood around and talked at them. She ate up more time than some of the people they were fighting and didn’t even tangentially serve any purpose whatsoever.

Well, as before, it’s still an improvement over probably about 8 of the other 10 episodes and just about anything Shana’s done in the last three months, but it’s hard to call such abuse of speedlines and the blur filter to really be a particularly engaging use of visuals. I could’ve used a breather from the fight music/tragic violins this episode too. I don’t think there was a moment of silence from start to finish. I can still hear screeching violins ringing in my ears. Plus there’s really no reason to believe they’ll actually go through with Risa agreeing to marry him in the finale after giving up to save Issei either. You dug yourself into this hole of no passable plot or character motivations, DxD, and I’m pretty sure that fancy dresses aren’t going to be the way to wring any vestiges out of it… unless they just skip to the reception at a strip club.

Preview:

I wonder if she’ll really get married or not!