天下制覇

But can he see why kids love Cinnamon Toast Crunch?

Impressions:

An episode with almost no Mako? Gadzooks. Keeping a consistent tone the whole way through an episode? What is this madness? Okay, so there were a couple places where the visuals got a bit inappropriately silly, and they’re still leaning on the infamous Japanese lack of short term memory for trying to reset Matoi from going head to head with Satsuki to struggling with every Tom, Dick, and Harry because feelings or something. There’s a reason Spiderman relies on his brain (and a rudimentary knowledge of physics) to defeat his enemies instead of simply having more spidery powers than Doc Ock has octopussy powers. We can avoid abusing the transitive property of power levels magic thread levels too. Which wouldn’t even be a big a deal if the show itself never missed an opportunity to harp on about it.

Of course, we run into the same problem that a lot of these fight scenes have had. They’re less actual fighting and more just a series of poses and/or whatever those awful attack flurry things are called. There should just be a moratorium period on anything involving one side standing motionlessly while they talk about either how invulnerable they are or how ferocious attacks they’re blocking are. This one had both. Trigger clearly know how to do better. They did so later in the episode, although still nowhere near the level of Matoi vs Satsuki. That still had the issue of being boringly one sided as well as having the whole thing explained instead of presented more organically though. Infodumping like that is a crutch, especially in what could have been a demoralizing scene. I guess after "I want to be stronger!" "Careful, he seems stronger!" "He’s stronger!" that ship had probably long since sailed anyway though. 

Next Episode:

This was not a promising preview.