天下制覇

  

I don’t know why I alliterated.

Impressions:

Ugh. I just want to slap these morons. The episode started with the exchange of “I’m Ilyasetc Einzbern. Do you know what Einzbern means?” “Einzbern!” “*stare*” “*stare*” “*stare*” -OP plays- “*stare*” “*stare*” And then they kept feeling the need to cut to Cheerleader Rin on the sidelines squealing about how impressive everything she was seeing was. Or christ, the cutaway in the middle of it for Kirei’s talking head hour. Or simply staring at each other. Ilya’s fight was also made of that exciting bit Japan loves where one side stands there motionlessly. I guess at least there were CGI gizmos protecting her instead of just ‘magical wall’ (or the Dragonball/Bleach/Jump standby, nothing), but that’s like being pleasantly surprised that the grapenuts are gravel instead of ground glass.

So what could have been an action packed episode featuring the dual fights of Saber vs Berserker and Rin vs Ilya ended up continually distracted away from what should have been the fun part of the episode and neither of them rose above the level of eye candy because of it. Still a hell of a lot better eye candy than certain other shows I could name, but there was no crescendo to the battle, or even a contrast between the two fighting. Breakdanceker was just as agile as Saber, and Saber was just as strong as Berserker, so the battle just kind of kept going on in the background until it ended when it got too far into the episode with some voice over lipservice tacked on in a weak attempt to bring things to a head. I know Japan is deathly in love with “Rarr! Strongest (feelings) always wins!” but it wouldn’t kill them to show that people have brains, ingenuity, and the ability to adapt or even just try something besides hit with stick in these things instead of always defaulting to “Proper Noun is Adjective-er than expected!” and calling that enough.