天下制覇

No grievous injury is too great, except those that happen offscreen.

Impressions:

Well, it's certainly miles better than last week just by dint of not being 20 straight minutes of talking heads, but like usual, it's a mixed bag. Lots of clippable little moments, and if there was an actual narrative, or purpose bringing it all together, would have been fine, but lacking those things, a lot of sound and noise signifying little. Mainly, you can only have people immediately recover from being cut in half, eviscerated, or dismembered so many times before it turns into more of a joke than something we're taking seriously. We're not even using lesser torture porn violence like eye gouging or finger breaking which is less over the top but more viscerally unsettling. And before we even reached the halfway point of the episode, half the cast had been all those things. So when it ends by going "Oh, these grievous injuries that happened off-screen DO count" with a particularly corny symmetrical violence bit, there's no buying it. After all, we haven't had a long flashback yet, and lord knows nobody can die in anime without one of those.

Then there's all the other weird writing issues that I can only scratch the surface of. The whole fight for one. I guess we're just randomly some other place, having a random boss battle? Nobody's really trying to do anything, or stop the other side from anything. It's quite literally just a random fight. And didn't we send out a literal army last week? Why is it just one dude now? I'm also still waiting for either of the two muggle characters to grow in any way. Typically with these kinds of setups, the normies either grow into badasses themselves, or their normalcy is their superpower, being a grounding source of empathy and/or common sense that the 'other worlders' have lost. If I had to guess, the dude is headed for the latter and the girl the former, but I give a much high probability that both just remain joke characters the whole way. 

Next Episode:

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