天下制覇

  

I don’t think they work like that.

Impressions:

It’s a lot harder to ignore all the “I know nothing but pain and darkness” with the action mostly gone and replaced by bad romantic ‘comedy’ and an extra helping of exposition. Like many of its light novel ilk, I have the distinct suspicion that it thinks it’s being clever by sitting the audience down and pointing out their bad cliches. Yes, awareness is the first step towards correcting the problem. You have identified that they have crushes on each other and are insecure fumbling ninnies about it. The next step is not to just go with that.

The contrivance fairy also waved her wand especially hard around the middle of the episode, with Tina dropping the phone at just the wrong moment and Kis somehow missing that she was carrying a minigun. I also confess to not being an expert on miniguns, but I’m pretty they’re not like shotguns where you can create sawed-off versions and they still work fine, so my reaction to that scene was not “Wow, she’s really conflicted.” There was also a moment when cars were perfectly horizontal on one of Japan’s many 80 degree roads. With how often they screw that up in anime, you’d think there’d just be someone permanently on staff for every studio just to make sure none of the hills are impossibly ridiculous.

Rather uneventful episode otherwise. The whole first half could have been cut without affecting anything in the rest, and the second half was Tina dropping out of the sky to attack a couple more times. Perhaps things went a little too fast in the first arc, but now they’re just wasting time, and relying on exposition and off-screen nonsense to try to sell the antagonist. The clown murdered rooms of people and gift-wrapped heads. A little jam on a cellphone’s not going to cut it.