天下制覇

…Maybe I'll skip Fridays after all.

Impressions:

Seriously, Mappa, what the hell was going on with the animation there? It looked like it was supposed to be slapstick, or maybe Paper Mario. Did you run out of time? I worry that it was an intentional style choice. I'm also pretty sure that it does fairly irreperable harm to your intrinsic mythology of "people turn into monsters due to the darkness in their hearts" if you add "people turn into monsters if they're touched by a monster," especially when the 'good' guys are blithely tossing the monsters around so they can strike poses and look cool. We've now established that style is a greater concern than protecting lives, so what are they going to do to raise the stakes when the time comes? Break their Ray-Bans?

So yeah, it was another messy mess of an episode, and perhaps worse than that, formulaic. Painfully so even. Right down to Raikou literally vivisecting one of the monsters and it just putting itself back together, before Seimei finally let him play with his armor and he instantly won. Why the hell are we even bothering? You have never once shown that you can win without it, and you always instantly win as soon as you use it, with zero negative consequences. The rest of the episode was mainly introducing the 'prince' character and the antagonist, both of whom distinguished themselves by how they sat around and either listened to or gave exposition. Yes. What a dastardly plan to let yourself be captive and wait to be brought right to the collection of magic sticks you were hoping for. Another thrilling adventure in Japaneseland. At least Short Round existed in the episode for maybe only about 60 seconds this week.