天下制覇

  

You know what would help, guys? Get rid of the Noise already.

Impressions:

The most exciting things for me in the first third of the episode were watching the screensaver of falling blocks they have running around command central. And then came the glasses, and with it, padding. Not just that, but padding as a plan to buy time, which they simply forgot approximately three seconds later for the standard “hit everything that moves” plan. Good lord, was the middle of this episode ridiculous stretched out for nothing more than “enemies are attacking lots of places” and “here are some magic power level drugs that induce the traditional melodrama.” I’m not even sure why when they already have the magic death songs that do the exact same thing, but I guess we need to have marginally different levels of the same bit of nonsense.

About the only real hope I had for the episode in the later going, especially once Hibiki snapped out of her coma, was that they’d bloodily murder one or both of them (or at the very least, rip off an arm of another one of season one Tsubasa’s full body jam-explosions) to actually visceral things up a little, and it looked like they might be going in that direction, and it would have been nicely jarring if she was doing her whole slicing up trying my best I got this I will protect you urk my inner-jam… except instead, there was the gentle brush of a tentacle against her magic button and then she was naked and any hope of jammery was as dead and buried as my soul.

At least the animation is still sort of keeping up, or at least the budget would make most other ‘action’ shows weep. Unfortunately, it’s bloody still all against the Noise who stand around and obligingly let themselves be killed until it’s time to languidly flail a tentacle at someone, so it’s about as interesting as a sack of potatoes. The actual fights between the characters continue mostly consist of about 10 seconds of spinning in the air and charging an attack, and then grunting and glaring in a still for a few minutes before everyone wanders off again. It’s still moving more and faster than many, many other shows I could name, but it’s stuck in a frustrating and unambitious groove and doing absolutely nothing of any note with any of its characters, and worse, it’s not showing any signs that this season is ever going to.