天下制覇

I know where the budget didn't go.

Impressions:

I'm still having problems getting into this arc, and all the crowd noise at the start while they couldn't actually spare the effort to animate them, resulting in a holy goddamned hell creepy backdrop of people staring in unblinking, frozen horror at the events unfolding before them wasn't helping matters in the slightest. Besides how the already flimsy story has ground to a halt, the biggest issue is the continued dismantling of Mumei's character, further and further from the manic badass pixie waif of the first few episodes and more into just another exploited helpless damsel in distress, at the mercy of The Evil Man who made her a half-monster because, you know, exploiting little girls, and she can only be saved by The Protagonist. They in particular seem to have forgotten to really give a good reason for B to be all pissy with A, so his pissyness feels especially out of place. Everybody's acting pretty idiotic at this point, but not even in ways that advance anything.

Similarly not helping is the weird de-escalation of the zombie attacks. We've gone from train crashes unleashing hordes, claustrophobic invasions, fighting on top of speeding trains, and gigantic not-titans, to… effortlessly massacring an army of them in an open field with mountains of heavy artillery and motorcycle cavalry. I think they lost one guy. To a zombie that bit a boot. For all the effort they put into the animation for that fight, and they certainly did, which is likely where all the effort spent not animating the crowd at the start went, most of what it accomplished was undermining the central conceit of the setting that there's some kind of zombie apocalypse going on. But I guess that would get in the way of dumbass teenagers being moody and shouting about their feelings.