天下制覇

How do we show they're wet? A single droplet of water on plastic hair.

Impressions:

Smash cut to impacts are fine as a rare treat, but when they're every single big moment of action scenes, you're losing all your lines of action, setup, and anticipation. They're the jumpscares of action. And unfortunately, so much of the first half relied on that. The second half thankfully improved things a lot, but I was constantly distracted by the same things as in the last arc; namely that it kept making up stuff and people would declare they have powers and then forget about them. Which isn't even to mention the eyerolling stuff like "We need to strip because we're so, so, sooooo wet," and then the wetness being drawing a couple droplets of water on their face while their hair and even clothing remains locked in place, completely immutable by any law of nature.

I was also once again struck by how obnoxious a character Ken is despite him being a complete non-entity that attempted nothing and achieved nothing for pretty much the entire episode. His 'big' moment was again yelling out that there had been a misunderstanding, but before he could explain anything, he needed to yell a paragraph about how it was really important to first establish that a misunderstanding had happened and that it was really important to him to communicate that there was a misunderstanding. Christ, that was as painful to write as it was to sit through. Everything else he existed for was yelling or gags. At least the girls are trying. He declares that he's so going to try and then smash cut to impact and we move on.

Which is all probably more negative than I really feel about the episode. I'm past resigned about this season at this point. It's shounen. It's going to do obnoxious shounen things. Like yell. Constantly. At least it has genuine effort and talent into the animation, which was on display again here, and didn't get bogged down in weepy maudlin nonsense, though the half-assed fanservice wasn't a huge step above that. I'd much rather have that than nothing at all. But so much could be improved by being a bit more cohesive and not being so gimmicky in every action scene.

Next Episode:

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