天下制覇

Of course you do.

Impressions:

Typical rallying cry for this series. At a macro level, it did things about as well as you'd expect it to. It moved quickly through the obligatory clean up of random non-threat monsters and display of how everyone's improved by mopping up the things on their own, along with a pithy speech or two about how we need to believe in them or whatever, without delving into inappropriate or unneeded melodrama or exposition. They could've probably made the first half an entire episode. Possibly they should have because most of the problems in execution came with the pair of limp noodles of the lot, although I think at this point in the show, it's probably too late to fix that and the best they could hope for is to dazzle with animation, which is obviously not going to happen.

Anyway, it was weird enough to dump Limp Noodle #1 right back into not-really-fighting Limp Noodle #2, which, if you're keeping count, he'll have done three times in the last two episodes now, but that got worse when they started abusing a hand of god time limit as both a poor attempt to add drama and an excuse to have the entire cast hanging out in the peanut gallery. It's also simply bizarre to have the entire show focused on one character at a time, and then remove absolutely all of them from the climax to focus on a character who's been less a main character and more set dressing since the first episode. Similarly, whatever awful melodrama they're going to wring out of the end by going Super Trance 5 or whatever is going to be nothing but unpleasant. I just hope it's brief.