天下制覇

I wonder if this episode made any sense to people more familiar with the game.

Taking a short break after this to pace myself. I'll get through at least Iruma, Val x Love, and Special 7 today. Maybe a couple more if my brain doesn't melt into goo.

Impressions:

I also wonder if this episode might have been all right if the direction wasn't complete nonsense, but then I remember that the first half was almost straight up padding and filler with little to no connection to anything at all in the second half except it involved many, but not all, of the same characters. Even that was split into two halves; characters reviewing the current geopolitical situation, and barely sentient idiots looking for a friend who wandered off. It's as cohesive and as interesting as my summary makes it seem.

Then we hit the action portion of the episode though, and no longer do rhyme or reason have any place in the show. They shoot torpedoes, so one tackles the other out of the sky into the water (where you'll remember the torpedoes are) to protect her. Thirty seconds later, more torpedoes are fired, so one leaps out of the water onto a ship, where they harmlessly explode against the bow. More than once, people just stand there and get hit with missiles and/or planes, and then five seconds later, a plane hit obliterates an entire giant monster fox. Someone takes a compound bow shot to the chest at point blank range and is just like "Now I'm angry." Then one spontaneously declares "We fulfilled our mission," holds up some random glowing box that at this point has not been seen anywhere before in the episode, someone throws a freaking starfish, and they all just wander off. I feel like a lunatic even trying to describe it. 

I feel like this episode showed that it has the budget to make a decent, if brainless action show out of itself, even with all the CGI abuse… or at the very least to the level of something like Infinite Stratos, but the 'fun' part of the episode is impossible-to-follow nonsense. If you're constantly waiting on characters to react and/or explain the fight scene, then like jokes, the moment is already lost. And even that ignores the atrocious first half of the episode, which is what I would expect the show to become more like as it continues.