天下制覇

Oh well, still undefeated in the Ivy League.

Impressions:

There’s nothing quite like driving 30 miles to a friend’s to watch the ol’ Alma Mater get crushed mercilessly… come back to a somewhat mediocre Shana episode, and then having finished almost all of it, I walk away for five minutes and Adobe decides to restart my system because it finished updating something and there goes the last half hour of work. Bah. I am so not going to summarize this a second time, go bother Totali for a summary. I’m grumpy now.

Anyway, much of my annoyance with this episode comes from the vast number of lines they gave to the immensely annoying Professor and Domino. In a show dominated by people who are relatively easy on the ears, those two have no volume level below a piercing shriek. There were also some pacing issues, especially near the end. The Hazes all broke into the barrier, briefly sparred with Sydoney (Margery getting the crap kicked out of her in one attack) and then the Professor appeared and shrieked at them all while they stood around (or in Margery’s case, bled on the ground) for a good two minutes before the ED started and the episode continued. Was all the exposition really needed? Couldn’t you have found a minute or two in the first half of the episode to cut out scenery shots?

All that said, there were some pretty nice things in the episode too. The action at the end was very good and bodes well for next week. Near the start, there was also some strangely well animated Shana car-hopping. I have no idea why they sunk a chunk of the budget into Shana leaping off cars, but I’m not going to complain about good animation in my action shows. I also really liked the symbolism of Yuji’s ‘hole’ as a black void with butterflies. To refresh your memory, general Japanese mythology holds that butterflies carry the souls of the dead.

And yes yes yes, this is pretty much completely unique from the novel, but it wasn’t really that bad either… just somewhat clumsily executed. I doubt we’ll get more than maybe a hint or two about dark overlord Yuji, but then again, hopefully we’ll see quite a bit of him in the inevitable third season. It would be nice to see him up against something other than grunts at some point too. Sure, he was still throwing around fireballs (why were they silver with the corrupt Reiji Maigo gone?) and cutting up tons of Dominos, but then again, I’m pretty sure that a stiff wind destroyed Domino in the first season.

ED Insert Song Silliness

Preview:

Kill yourself, Kazumi. Please.