天下制覇

Lots of six packs this week.

Impressions:

Better than last week's awful episode, but it once again leaned hard into trying to be a lore episode. While that's more palatable than when it tries to be funny, the setting still makes absolutely no sense and all the attempts to exhaustively explain it are just plain bad. I'm also a bit curious how they have fully modern jet boats and skyscrapers, but their 'airplanes' are goofy Final Fantasy airships with propellers. And now the supposed terrorist nation turns out to be a resort town, which they insist is just a facade, but this is hardly a Ba Sing Se situation. Literally every person, including the Evil Leader is a goofball without even the barest trace of malice, so it's just a mess of saying one thing and committing to the far opposite. Not for comedic effect at all.

The couple bits that I felt were strong a few episodes back were focused on the characters, not the nonsense story. Specifically Max still being a hero but in a more quiet and humble way, albeit still a bit broken. Room to grow and mature. A Peter B Parker kind of arc. The one new girl here could've played up to that, but the episode was so focused on giving a dump on the geopolitical situation and faffing over that instead, which again, just plain makes no sense whatsoever so is better glossed over, not given central billing, let alone a multi-episode arc.