天下制覇

Sui’s out of spare limbs now.

Impressions:

The caps don’t really show it well, but this episode was absolutely packed with flashbacks and recycled footage. It wasn’t awful as an end to the whole Arua arc, but does raise the question of "Why did we just have an Arua arc?" It’s also getting hard to take Sui seriously as an antagonist when he loses an arm in every fight. What’s he going to do now? Bite Lyner? Maybe he can go all Phantom Limb or get ice arms through Kuu’s weapon somehow. At least the fight was pretty nicely done, albeit short. I did like the creativity in using Arua as kind of Lyner’s mobile option to get the element of surprise. Let’s not think too deeply about Lyner using a little boy as a… vessel… shall we say… for redirecting his spells.

Otherwise though, there’s not a lot to talk about this week. Milan now has the dragon artifact and… Lyner whined and whined and whined and whined about Alpha Stigma. They simply have not done a convincing job selling these damn things as evil yet to warrant this much drama over it. The closest we have is Sui forcefully activating Lyner’s and him going berserk. Every other Alpha Stigma activation has been brought on by wholesale slaughter and torture. They needed to start out with Lyner just up and randomly wrecking some village and slaughtering innocents for no reason if they wanted to make any of this Alpha Stigma melodrama actually work. They’re apparently fairly easily controllable, and only magical gimcracks or wholesale slaughter of your loved ones and friends can make it go berserk. How that makes them different from any other semi-powerful mage is beyond me.

And yes, I know that UBW is out. I’ll get to it when I get to it. I’m still waiting for Symphonia though. *sigh*

Preview:

Surprise sex for Sion to dump Arua. Ferris is a fan. Milk is confused.