天下制覇

That'll give her something to cry about!

Impressions:

Even though I haven't played the game, it's hard to ignore the things that I know about it; namely that none of the main characters so much as made an appearance in this episode, and not in the good way where every single one of them was bloodily murdered like Ga-Rei Zero did. Rather infamously, the female here gets unceremoniously booted out of the main plot and relegated to DLC after being advertised as the lead. That doesn't mean that they'll do the same here, theoretically having learned from Namco's mistakes, but pfft. This is anime. And ufotable. Their days of Futakoi Alternatives or Shinobudens are long long gone.

But anyway, given that it's just a credit roll ED instead of claymation, it should be self-evident that this probably won't be one of ufotable's stronger efforts. They can try the whole way through and get to play with the clay, or they can make a bunch of overdrawn backgrounds, jam CGI awkwardly into everything, animate a few very well down action scenes and spend the remaining 22 minutes of the episode with talking heads, pretty backgrounds, and talking feet. Yes, talking feet. Is that a step up from watching two dour men slowly circle each other? Who can say.

This would absolutely be more the latter than the former of their two basic show templates. When there is action, it looks visually fantastic, and they actually managed to provide a little weight to it this week by contextualizing it instead of UBW's simple "Look at some flashing lights for a while." And the backgrounds do make for very pretty screencaps. But fifteen plus minutes of the episode are still going to be spent watching people blather. This episode would've been nothing but improved if it had started at around the 17 minute mark when the apocalypse hit, all the princess's comrades got sucked into a doom tornado, and then they murdered a child in a CGI dragon tornado just for kicks. We didn't need fifteen minutes of doom approaches to establish sufficient context for why those things might be bad, and yet, that's what we got. Still, that's something to actually cry about, so that puts it far ahead of the sociopaths in a certain other continuing show later today who's on the chopping block.