天下制覇

  

This was a weird way to recap.

Impressions:

This was a narratively bizarre episode and I have a difficult time seeing what this advanced or accomplished. If they had replaced Grinny Water McTeeth with just an evil doll of the week, it would have been shockingly close to a bottle episode even. It was kind of like they meant to include Maria in the past few episodes but had forgotten, so needed an episode to do a repeat/digest of the last couple weeks, only with Maria alone. Well, and a fair bit of just straight up fanservice to replace all the grunting, technobabbling, and only some of the feelings powering, because the desire to get stronger in order to… get stronger, is the most compelling character motivation imaginable.

It unfortunately continued the trend of all the effort in animating fights going into beating up the Noise instead of named characters interacting with each other in the fist to face way. Those parts remain depressingly full of stills, speedlines, and grunting. I can’t even imagine what they’re thinking with the… reveal? confrontation? whatever it was at the end with Hibiki’s long lost father working at a random convenience store either. I really simply have no idea how that is supposed to tie into anything or provide… well… anything in any manner. Who even cares?