天下制覇

At least they animated these.

Impressions:

It certainly says something about the direction and composition of this show that they put non-trivial effort into animating a fight against a random orc (a random spinning orc), but not against giant centipedes. This whole episode was weird in general. It dumps out a pair of new party members in that orc fight, the token Tales snarky 'little' girl, and the token Tales half-naked playboy who will betray the party, replace the one who betrays the party, or both. I'm also pretty sure that I lost the thread of the story here. Weren't they traveling with Alishia's giant entourage through relatively normal forests? Now they're all by themselves in the middle of a blasted wasteland feeling up little girls and fighting a dragon.

Well, I can't say the sudden exceedingly abrupt lurching refocus of events isn't welcome compared to the fat lot of nothing before, but the whole thing with her brother being a dragon, mopey flashbacks, multiple characters yelling about how much they care about him… all that plus Sorey's obnoxious nonsense about doing his best make it all superficial at best because it goes through everything so fast. And even at the end, doesn't actually provide any kind of resolution to anything. The dragon just has its moment of recognition and flies off, all this to be dredged up once again in the future. It would've worked much better without the half-naked guy or Sorey's hero complex, and completely focused on Edna. Woudn't have meshed any better with previous episodes and would've still been largely superficial, but at least it would've been focused.