天下制覇

Everyone involved in the production of this episode should feel embarrassed.

Impressions:

This episode just straight up went into crazytown about six minutes into the episode and somehow managed to get worse by the second once there. The real antagonist is the police chief, who's going to hold Kei at gunpoint for five straight minutes while he explains that he was behind everything. Why? Well, he just loves terrorism that much. The real real antagonist? The wizard? Well, out of goddamned nowhere, he drops the reveal "Hey, you know that massacre during the war you were in? Well, it was me!" First, dude, I'm pretty sure this is the first we've heard of a massacre. Hell, I'm pretty certain at no point was the existence of a war ever brought up. But this is I guess how they make it personal, because it wasn't personal before with the killing of his partner. Why did they even drag her to their secret base in the first place? And leave her to just cast a little fire spell that apparently torched the whole place in about two minutes? Couldn't invest in a single extinguisher? And then reveal that they knew all along that they were about to be raided by the cops but I guess decided to hang around anyway? Is this a parody? Am I being pranked? People were paid to write this.

But that's just the writing and directing. The animation… good god, the animation of this episode. If this was made by Shaft, it would have just had a bunch of "to be finished" cards every time there was an action scene. Instead, we got about 10 seconds of that weird-ass overly fluid animation where everything is animation-smeared… except with half the frames dropped, across about 20 seconds of fights. The other 10 seconds were all stills. Seriously, at best, it was all about one to two seconds of smeary janky movement, then a still. Still after still after still after still. The animation budget must have completely bottomed out. So much for any hope of the flair promised by the OP. Good god, the best thing this episode and show does is make me feel guilty for ragging on Mappa's scripts and production.