天下制覇

Len is so much cuter than Evatrice.

Impressions:

A fairly dull and needlessly confusing first half with the split Evas, but at least the second half was fun. Eva solved Beatrice’s riddle, got the gold, and her imaginary self became the new Beatrice, which meant about 6 straight minutes of Beatrice recapping about 65% of the various magical stuff before we finally managed to escape that particular black hole and get things in motion again. "Motion" being relative, because this episode was animated pretty awfully, even for Umineko’s standards, to say nothing of the ugly blur on Rosa’s spitted head. At least we got to see Evatrice humping a big pile of gold. That’s… well… that’s something.

Things finally got fun/interesting about two thirds of the way through the episode when Evatrice decided to go screw around with Rosa and Maria for Maria’s shrieking right outside of her room. The Last Arc finish was also amusing, but I am a Len player, and watching somebody repeatedly beat up Maria and then bring her back to life just to kill her again is its own reward, but appreciated none the less. Battler and Beatrice also finally did something above and beyond whining/laughing about events this episode as he finally lost his temper at her for taking so much pleasure in it, resulting in Beatrice stepping in and mercy killing Rosa and Maria. Battler’s finally starting to get a little more of a backbone instead of just whining all the time, and it does start to develop a bit of a softer side of (metaworld) Beatrice, which she really has been lacking up until now.