天下制覇

The mid-season doldrums are striking hard.

Impressions:

The battle starts, after all the setup, and then the entire rest ofthe episode is spent on even more setup. Possibly the most interesting part of this episode is entirely on a technical level, where their CGI blending got a bit sloppy and awkward. The whole episode was pretty cheap and sloppily made though. When the dynamic duo went to attack the big boss, instead of showing literally anything whatsoever, it instead cut to him doing a microwave render kind of shot where he just spun while a narrator… a different one from usual… explained that armor exists, and armor can be used to block attacks. Boy, I'm sure glad we didn't actually see them fighting and just saw that instead.

That would also be abour where the entire episode went completely wrong and entirely into filler/padding territory, as the dude then spent the rest of the episode explaining that he's a bandit for money, and looks at everything in terms of money, so despite squaring off halfway into the episode, the actual fight won't be kicking off until next week. Same with all the other pairings. Everybody squared up, and then the antagonists had to chew scenery like taffy to make sure that we made it to the end of the episode without anybody actually having to fight yet.