天下制覇

Bachou, I think I love you already.

Impressions:

Ah, Ikkitousen. I wish I knew how to quit you. Although don’t let the caps fool you; the first five minutes of this episode was just one long recap of the first season and DD. That was… unpleasant, but understandable. At least for now, we can all pretend that GG never happened and go along on our merry way. Pretty much the entire episode was Bachou’s invasion of Kyoshou, and I’ve got to admit that I adore her already. It’s not just the tomboy attitude, or the way that her first and best move in a fight is the quick kick to the groin, or even the way that she hides bread under her shirt to make it look like she’s stacked. Actually, wait, no… it is those things. And the giant red fuzzy ponytail too.

Outside of the five minutes of recap which really just served to point out Sousou crawling out of the wreckage, there wasn’t really much else in the way of plot this week though. We got to see that Kyocho is indebted to Sousou because he saved her from being raped, so that’s… uh… something. Bachou’s brother is also apparently crazy because of Sousou, although I’m tempted to peg him as last boss already. Crazy, my foot. This also doesn’t even rank in the top three of the most fanservicey things I’ve watched this week either. Ikkitousen… sort of almost being kind of not really respectable? Yeah, that’s not going to last long. The action could have also been a bit better (and that’s why I didn’t rip it), but Ikkitousen has certainly seen worse days and there’s no way that I’m going to complain about a feisty tomboy flirting with and then kicking the groins of random men as the meat of the episode.

In any case, this was an excellent start to the new season and worlds beyond anything GG produced. This isn’t even all that bad of an intro episode to the series if you’re looking for something light and actiony to watch. Hopefully the long fight scene wasn’t an artifact of the 5 minute recap, but I’ve definitely got a lot more hope for this season now, even if the chance of Bachou fighting a giant shark is all but nil. At least we already know from the promos that she’ll be fighting a giant tin can robot. That’s… kind of close.

Belated Edit: 
No OP this week, and the ED is really lame, have some Bachou instead (I wanted to test a new way to encode off of streamrips).

Preview:

Bachou and Seito.