After the severe letdown that was everything about last week’s episode, this episode actually managed to be better by giving me no hopes and no expectations whatsoever. Ironically, only now that they’ve stopped trying to include comic relief every five seconds (one episode before the whole season ends) did everything become absolutely hilarious.
It’s really a shame that they even bothered trying to shoehorn in Kotori’s parents at this stage. I had high hopes that her backstory might be at least touched on respectfully since she remains one of the most important characters to the overarching plot, and honestly they didn’t do too badly with the Druid explanation a few episodes back. But it was so rushed and so bad and evoked little to no emotion at all, whereas the vn reveal honestly left me in tears.
If they had just left them fighting Midou, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but the fact that they tried to cram in the big reveal about them having some remnants of free will left fell very flat, moreso considering the anime hasn’t touched at all on the fact that familiars aren’t expected to have any free will of their own, or that Kotori thought she was controlling mindless robots this entire time.
The scene with Akane confronting Kashima Sakura was probably the scene I had the least problems with in the episode. Actually, it was interesting. And then Suzaki-getting-eaten-by-the-worst-CG-dinosaur-in-history happened, and I was just back to laughing my ass off.
^^^ This about sums it up. If I think too much on how they wanted the Kagari scenes in this episode to be taken seriously, I’ll probably get bummed out, so instead I’m still just laughing about them because they were so bad.
Honest to god, this is some of the worst animation I’ve ever seen, and considering I’ve kept up with Studio DEEN adaptations, that’s saying something. The fact that they expect all the fight scenes to be taken 100% seriously while everyone’s running around on green cardboard and Midou’s doing the can-can is even more hilarious. Close-up facial expressions were just as wonky as expressions on background NPCs you’re not supposed to pay attention to, and the scene of Suzaki being eaten might as well be nominated for a comedy anime award.
I don’t mind when anime has poor visuals as long as the storytelling is good enough to make up for it, but considering this anime has offered nothing but bad storytelling and bad visuals, I’m feeling rather unsympathetic towards 8bit. An anime should be at least better-looking than its visual novel counterpart, considering the whole point of an anime adaptation is to tell the story visually. But honestly, these last two episodes have felt more like a drawn-out powerpoint for someone’s class project, completed at two in the morning with the hopes of getting a D-minus at best.
This adaptation started out with a lot of potential, and it’s just been a shame to see it go down the drain like that. I’m kind of hoping someone will just make a Rewrite Abridged series at this point, so I can get some more laughs out of all this. With one episode left, there’s literally no way this anime can be salvaged, but I’ll watch it anyway just to enjoy the clusterfuck at this point.