天下制覇

Whole lotta blood splatter this week.

Impressions:

This episode definitely blew its load in the first half. The animation was at least on one of CloverWorks highs and the first two fights were both quite well animated and choreographed, even if they all ended up being pretty simplistic. The pair won by grabbing the dude's spear and tanking a couple hits. Tokiyuki won by getting one slash and then rope-a-doping, though honestly, pretty sure the reverse would've worked just fine too. Tokiyuki's especially probably should have been a little more dramatic and drawn out the actual plan here before going right to the dude starting to hallucinate cartoonish nonsense from blood loss and Tokiyuki himself enjoying it, and there was absolutely no need to end on a drawn out flashback of the dude's backstory either. Let villains be ridiculous villains. "He had a hard life" adds nothing. They're peasants during wartime under multiple brutal regimes while bandits and man-eating monsters roam the land. We can take "bad childhood" as a given.

Aside from that, which chewed up about half of the back half of the episode, the weakest of the fights was the character who the arc was based on, fighting against random screaming dude who we're told is the strongest, but never actually does anything to validate that random bit of exposition. And I get the feeling that the staff didn't care much for this either, as he attacked just a couple times, shown as flashing lines, and then we had about three times as long spent explaining that he flicks his wrist or whatever. And thus, knowing how the gimmick works, he is instantly defeated. Well, some ball kicking in there too, which was the only satisfying moment of that entire encounter. Didn't do the new guy much justice here.

Next Episode:

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