天下制覇

Weren't the baddies openly flaunting supernatural powers too?

Impressions:

I'm not really sure what the whole bit with the religious empire at the start was all about. It almost seemed like a big ol' parody of the religious right with the chanting lunatics pulling assault rifles and rocket launchers out of every orifice, then they just up and gave up and were totally reasonable, gullible even about a few supernatural tricks that obviously prove them gods and not demons, before unceremoniously exiting the episode entirely about five minutes in. The rest of it was largely setup for next week. They started the invasion/attack on the evil empire, isolating a few people into their appropriate matchups, but this is where we were a few episodes back, and that resulted in an episode that was largely talking heads and little to none of the promised action.

At least the story is still cruising right along though, with about a half-dozen random plot threads all moving, which makes it a bit more tolerable than something like Vanitas or Generic Jump Show #71235. Miku and her gang's escape and future… whatever… has a lot more potential to go in an interesting direction than the royal brats doing the same thing last week. I think it's because the ensemble cast thing is being handled at least somewhat deftly here and while a lot of characters (eg that nun) are still pretty pointless, no one scene is eating up a third of the episode and dragging things to a total halt. Or maybe it's just because I always watch this immediately after Sonny Boy, and my brain is always struggling to make sense of anything after that. Mappa still owes me some goddamned slick action next week after half-assing the last set of bouts.