天下制覇

  

Thus was spent about half the episode.

Impressions:

Well, it was certainly more gangsta than episode 1 was, but then again, it basically just replaced its allusions to sex and drugs last week (and empty allusions are all it has the balls for) with more violence. Budget did have a bit of an uptick from the first episode to support that, but most of the ‘fighting’ very helpfully happened just off screen. It’d wet itself if it had even half of what Symphogear put into its matroyshka doll missile sequence alone. But the direction and tone… eh. They’re so adult and cool because they kill dozens of people a week. Okay, we’ve reached about the Dredd level of maturity, no matter how much staring into space, whinging on about the grittiness of society… simultaneous to two giant men doing acrobatic backflips through the air like an impromptu Cirque de Soleil. You might want to try to figure out the tone there, guys. It might help if there was a single bone of levity in the entire thing’s body too. Even Vin Diesel knows the importance of the well delivered quip in his masturbatory kill-everything affairs that this is aspiring to be.

Mostly though, it was still just glacially plodding. “Girl showed up at door, walked girl home.” It’s not like they go sidetracked by some kind of chase scene or anything either. There were some thugs at the start and end of the trip, so they killed them. This was like a particularly boring fetch quest for an open world game, or what drags Jim Rockford or the members of the A*Team into the actual case in the first five minutes. But since they have to pad every single scene out by growling, admiring themselves, zoomed in closeups of the breasts of the exploited character with all the self-awareness of Donald Trump, talking about the cruelty of society, and more growling, it lasts the whole episode, leaving with nothing but the tacked on promise of “evil people in poor lighting” to come.