天下制覇

Did we really need an entire faux magical girl OP?

Impressions:

Did we record an especially obnoxious bubblegum pop song and just couldn't figure out a show to throw it into? We skipped the ED to have enough time to work this in. Was this something that the animators pushed for in return for continuing to work for a salary of three packing peanuts a month? Probably, yes. This was the kind of episode that would have probably been just fine if the torrent of exposition had all come organically, particularly if it had come from the result of going around, talking to people and investigating like an actual procedural. It did none of those things. Hell, I'm not sure Saki or Kotoko even left their chairs once the flashback exposition dump began and consumed the remaining two thirds of the episode.

It's a shame too because the back and forth between them at the start wasn't bad. Saki plays a much better straight man in just plain not putting up with Kotoko's smarmy snark than most anime characters do. But that's abandoned a third of the way into the episode and all the pertinent information is beamed directly into their heads from the internet, which is then conveyed in ten straight minutes of infodump, made more egregious by literally stumbling over the boyfriend fighting the boob ghost at the end of the episode. All that infodumping wasn't even leading them to finding it or the like.

Next Episode:

…