天下制覇

Feh. Whatever.

Impressions:

Well, as a finale, this blew. About half the episode was spent on landing the plane and they raised more new questions while answering absolutely none. However, it did end with an announcement of season 2 (in October if the official site is to be believed) and basically a next episode preview so, uh… well… I guess we’ll just call this episode 13/26 for the sake of argument, and if you just accept it as that, it was a pretty nice episode. It’s still hard to shift episode context from "final" to "halfway" though. Had that been known earlier, I probably wouldn’t have complained as much about the pacing and all this focus on the Saeki family would have made a lot more sense… or at least would have made Aine’s death feel a little less crowbarred in to create some drama going into a three month hiatus.

For the most part, I enjoyed this episode, even while it kept piling on the developments. Touru is apparently an ex-handler, probably Kurogane’s given her reaction to it, which apparently gives her special powers, or at the very least an immunity to Rhodonite’s time stop abilities. This was confirmed later in the episode by the same mark appearing on Reishirou as Aine died. Speaking of that, I didn’t like the way they handled that very much. Tomoharu was still all gung-ho about saving the plane and everybody got sad and waved good bye to Aine, telegraphing the hell out of it and making Tomo look like a giant doofus when he broke down about it afterwards. It wasn’t even a particularly sensical death either. The burial dolls can just use up their power and then that’s it. Where’s that limit? Wherever the writers decide. That’s just a recipe for terrible terrible deus ex mecha, not to mention that you’d think somebody would have mentioned that to Tomo or Misao at some point.

Sadly, very little else is touched on or resolved. Takatsuki’s still leaking magic juice… and spent most of the episode unconscious anyway. The good guys still have the magic dildo Ignitor, and… that’s about it. Like I said, not much of an ending, but it’d be perfectly fine as just the halfway point, so take that as you will.

Man, after how busy today was, the only new episode of anything that I’m following between now and July 1st is Tears to Tiara on Sunday. Free time is scary!

Preview:

*sigh* See you in the fall.