天下制覇

At least they sort of mixed things up.

Impressions:

The first half was full of self-references and callbacks, while the second was full of external ones. The first ten minutes was practically a re-hash of nearly every 'joke' that the show's made so far, although the dumbest thing might've been the (secondary) psycho girl showing up to offer an infodump… again… only for Dumbface to go "Nah. Let's just stop at the point where we've recapped everything we already know and save it for later," whereupon she wandered off again. Way to chew up another few precious minutes while contributing some particularly lazy fanservice. Not that one would expect much from a swimsuit episode, but it somehow still manages to go out of its way to be obnoxious and call attention to how it totally could be doing something, but the characters are such gomers that nah, let's not. Until episode 10, obviously.

The second half switched gears… sort of. The test of courage/ghost story thing is pretty closely tied to beach crap in Japanese media, so it's more of a locational than thematic switch. Then they decided to thow in as many references as possible in a quick montage. If all you're hoping for is a character dressed like a Ghost Buster and confirmation that someone on staff played Fatal Frame at some point so you can clap like a seal about that reference, then good news! Then they try to jam in some drama having nothing to do with anything, yet still enough to rock a character's worldview. Melodramatic halfwits.

Next Episode:

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