天下制覇

Stills with speedlines, oh boy.

Impressions:

Man, the budget for the 'action' part of this episode was comically atrocious. Stills with speedlines into more stills into stills. Then, after having cut over the start to dump us right into the non-action, they cut to the end. Which is almost kind of a summary for the nonsense that was all the hullaballoo over him getting a new account. It lasted for literally one phone call before he was able to convince his old friend it was him. And then when he ran into Natsume, all he had to do was go "Uh, I totally knew him," the monster dog jumped on him, and, welp, that was that. 'New' father figure achieved, complete with star-struck look. Not that it stopped the show from then having a long scene where the two of them quite literally explained everything.

As for the other part of the episode, it's kind of a weird message, especially in the context of all this being an MMO with artificially limited resources and the soldiers being mostly robots playing a game for fun. On the other hand, the supposed civilian sacrifice to shore up the military is all off-screen hand-wavey things, on both ends. There's no actual sacrifice being made, and no gain really being achieved. It seems like just an excuse to bring up the one girl who has so far done nothing but tell Natsume to get bent, and do a nice thing to show she actually does care, which is… really not a healthy kind of relationship, but she's hardly an entity, let alone an actual character in the show, and I wouldn't be shocked if this was the last we ever saw of her. And then, of course, a feel-good montage about sacrificing urban development for the military-industrial complex, which is built on a complete lie. So… kinda hard to go for the emotions you're shooting for, guys.