天下制覇

At least Horie Yui is still collecting a paycheck.

Impressions:

I started out this episode thinking to myself "Well, show, are you going to make any more sense this week?" And it started the episode by having little chicken monsters literally fish out unconscious girls face down in the water. Who I guess are immune to drowning? Okay, then. That's a faster answer than I expected. Mostly, it was the same as last week, which is to say equal parts fluff and impossible-to-follow nonsense with a greater budget than it probably should have.

I guess the fluff was a bit more focused on pretending like things were dramatic and serious this week, chicken monsters notwithstanding, but it's still collapsing under the weight of having a billion characters but not wanting any one to take the role of a protagonist. Which could work in an ensemble-cast type situation, but ensembles still have individual stories that play out week to week even before moving to the next character(s). We're at two episodes where the highest height of character drive is "I have to do my best, but I'm slightly hurt so may not be able to do my best, but that's okay because we'll all do our best." I can't call that character or story driven, so what is supposed to be driving things here? Probably the crabs crawling all over the jailbait and the chicken monsters.