天下制覇

Are these important characters? Where did they even go?

Impressions:

The pieces are there, but I feel like we're less baking a cake here, and more haphazardly throwing things from the pantry into a pot and calling whatever comes out of that a cake. Gourmet ingredients, mind you, and it was nice to see some action animation again, and yes, that's a terrible analogy, but where things really fell apart was at what was clearly meant to be the emotional climax of the episode. Natsume flashes back through everybody telling her to give up on her dreams and what she wants to do and shouts out defiantly… "I never believed in myself, and I never had the courage to be more than who I was!" Uh, hold on just a minute here, girl. Angrily telling people that she was capable of doing anything she wanted was just about the only thing she did for the past three episodes. We could've had some prosaic speech about defying fate, destroying the awful world, or even just daddy issue stuff, but we're going with that? It lands like a wet, sloppy sock in the face.

The rest of the episode was more of a continuation of the mess that was last week. The first 5 minutes should've been the end to last week's episode for starters. Then we move into her finally getting what she thought she wanted with her new friends while her old friends are left behind. Standard sit com storyline. Except once again, we only kind of do the start of all that and forget any kind of resolution. They also introduce confusingly named triplets, complete with names slapped across the screen, she almost accidentally shoots one thanks to terrible trigger discipline, and then… they're also seemingly dropped from the episode, so we can set up the conflict for next week, that they're being sent into an unwinnable mission dedicated to killing off their entire playerbase except the whales. Because that will make it more popular? Am I really understanding the logic here right? Couldn't we at least Kobayashi Maru it instead? And the human side of it might have been even worse. We found a nest. Ergo, we found the source of all monsters everywhere, and killing this one thing will wipe out everything everywhere