天下制覇

The first of many.

Impressions:

A relatively solid episode as we enter into a rather meandering and undirected portion of the game. They cut down on a bit on the whole "The Score wanted you to destroy Akzeriuth, so it’s cool, man" scene, which is good, because like many things concerning The Score, it didn’t make a whole ton of sense. They included most of the Guy scenes with Luke, which were pretty nice, although a bit cheesy both in the game and here. We also got a very truncated version of Luke finally getting around to being alright (give or take) with killing other people and even had a rather nice little fight scene against a generic soldier to come with it. Whoever that guy was, he should have been given a raise.

Sunrise really did an absolutely awesome job in changing the whole Daath thing though. In the game, the cathedral where Ion and Natalia are being held is absolutely huge with about 10 soldiers total wandering around, reliant on you ringing gongs so that you can lure and then kill them. Sunrise actually added some drama to the infiltration and more importantly, made it feel like the party really was sneaking around. Ion and Natalia’s chamber was actually guarded in the anime too, while it was just some random room with a soldier in the hallway in the game.

Overall though, this isn’t really the most interesting segment of the game, and the anime reflects that. It’s not really horrible, but there’s just a long segment where very little happens and it takes a long time to do so. Next week looks like it’ll be completely spent on Keterburg/Jade’s past, so I’m interested in seeing how they stretch that out. Maybe they’ll move the hot spring scene up quite a bit and the party will spend the rest of the show in their swimsuits. I certainly wouldn’t mind.

Also, I cannot believe that they included the "Water doesn’t make you wet" scene and even added diagrams to illustrate it.

Preview:

Jade’s hot sister.