天下制覇

This episode got a bit weird in the later going.

Impressions:

The same things are crippling it as before; that Mangetsu is a bit of a goober, it loves to talk your ear off with mostly nonsense, and it's doing a poor job with the stakes of the battle royale, but it might have made some headway on at least the Mangetsu front by having her go berserk bonkers. Why precisely, not terribly clear as all the groundwork for her has, again, been that she's a big ol' goober. In your more typical magical girl battle royale where everyone's more intrinsically damaged, it works a lot better, and perhaps that was the first step in showing that Mangetsu somehow is. Or maybe she was feeding off of Nene's psychic waves of her mother being mindwiped and sent to live on the farm with another family. It's not hugely clear, which I'm mostly okay with since I also don't want them to sit down and spend half an episode explaining it to me either.

It was also nice that the whole episode was spent on the battle itself. I'd be happy if we never went back to the school crap. Hell, you could probably do some clever narrative stuff with constant monthly skips. I'm sure the budget, if nothing else, will dictate that schooltime returns in force. What tried my patience a bit more was that they certainly didn't give up the nonsense exposition. How many words can you say about beam spam? Apparently a goddamned lot. Then someone went "Wait, your squatty robot is an embodiment of your soul" so the sniper one turned into a big flailing snake monster that shoots tentacles. Again, this is the kind of thing that should come from or be part and parcel to a mental breakdown or overdosing on death steroids in desperation, not because you grunted and said it was time to try your very super best.

It was certainly worlds better than Fire Force's episode this week, so I'm content to ride this one out on Fridays. I expect my hopes to be betrayed.

Next Episode:

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