天下制覇

I wonder if light novels are even written anymore or if they're just procedurally generated.

Impressions:

After the two awful episodes, I entered this with a feeling of weary resignation. When the fight began with him accidentally tripping over and then groping her, that immediately changed to actual physical pain. Thankfully, the rest of the fight pulled things back into somewhat more respectable territory. Still full of unneeded exposition, overexplaining things, and shots to the peanut gallery just to react while the crowd at large maintained a respective silence, as is only right and proper for a gladiatorial arena match. Oh, and let's not forget him losing control and giving in to the darkness within him. And even though she won in every measurable way, she 'lost' on a technicality. So even without the groping, there still would've been cliches abound and room for improvement, but the fight was actually decently animated and choreographed, and bore relatively little staring and posing for awkward lengths, so cliche-a-thon as it may have been, it was still better executed that this nonsense usually is.

Then the entire second half of the episode was going on a 'date' with his totally-definitely-a-boy girlfriend and sister before being recruited into the student council for special missions and decided that it really wasn't worth showing that fight so we instead got to watch people watching the fight, so… one steps back, two steps forward, five steps backward off the pier and into the Hudson. It still showed a chunk of budget and talent in the fight for the first half though, which is a hell of a lot more than I can say for its Monday competition. Too bad that over half the episode was still utterly banal time wasting nothingness.

Next Episode:

Pew pew.