Sorry about how late this is – I actually only finally got the chance to watch the episode today. I’ll have Death Parade 10 and 11 hopefully tomorrow.
Binan High is having its school festival, and, like any school festival in Japan, the different clubs organize different events for the festival-goers. At Binan High, however, there is a cash prize awarded to the best club, which catches the Earth Defense Club’s attention. They eventually decide to make a cafe serving curry – something Atsushi is apparently very good at making – although that’s not all. The club also had the odd idea of doing it in their Battle Lovers costumes and pretending that they are ‘cosplaying’ the mysterious fighters regularly spotted around the school.
Now, most things make Kinshirou angry, but it seems like curry makes him especially angry due to it dredging up ridiculously melodramatic memories of his past with Atsushi, and how they stopped being friends over his own petty jealousy. Zundar currently isn’t around to infect any new students, however – he’s busy talking to the Press Club’s goldfish, who is revealed to basically be his boss.
All the anger about curry eventually culiminates in Kinshirou and Atsushi learning eachother’s true identities, Kinshirou going full on Super-Saiyan-Emo and launching into a berserker mode in his attempt to destroy the Battle Lovers once and for all.
…no, seriously. That happens. To be continued!
well, uh. That sure was a thing.
This is the last episode of this I’m doing a full review of, and to be blatantly, brutally honest…I’m kind of relieved. This show has mostly just been a disappointment for me overall, and every now and then I kind of wish I’d chosen to blog Yoru no Yatterman instead, but oh well. I think this episode was a perfect example of one of the main problems with the show as a whole – it builds itself up as a gag/parody show, but every now and then there’s a moment of seriousness or drama that is so jarring that I don’t really know how to react to it. Sometimes I feel like it’s supposed to be part of the humour – usually, it kind of works in a ‘the joke is that they’re taking something ridiculous so seriously’ kind of way…but this episode felt like it was played more straight than before.
It was obvious that we would be building up to the truth about Atsushi and Kinshirou’s past – it’s been hinted at since the beginning (and in the entire ending theme), and the huge reveal is that SURPRISE IT’S FUCKIN NOTHING. Kinshirou got shitty at Atsushi because he….wanted to go eat curry…without him… and since then he’s hated both curry and Astushi (and, presumably, En). I get the point that it’s meant to be outrageously petty, and yet the ensuing fight seems incredibly serious for this show. The blend of ridiculous and drama could have worked with the right direction – after all, Gintama does it all the time – but here it just doesn’t. Especially since the ending theme tries to play up Atsushi and Kinshirou’s relationship as something serious, and their falling out as something incredibly sad – and yet the narrative of their past is so unbelievably stupid.
The worst thing about this episode is actually the fact that they’re spreading it out over two, but clearly didn’t have quite enough material for that so everything is even more drawn out than usual. The most ‘oh come on‘ example is when it literally showed every single boys’ transformation sequence one after the other…when they were just transforming to serve curry. The transformation sequence started at 10:48 and finished at 12:34, meaning that the show seriously padded out this episode with nearly two whole minutes of nothing. I guess it’s a little excusable since it’s most likely the last time we’ll see the boys transform (as this episode continues into the next) but it still seemed dumb to do it when they weren’t even transforming for battle at the time. Other than that, everything moves very slowly (that goddamn goldfish even points this out) and by the time something actually starts happening, the episode is over. Also, the animation seemed pretty bad too, many of the movements were jerky and the frame-rate was definitely noticeably lower.
I do want to know how this all gets resolved, but as of now, I think trying to inject drama into a show like this was a huge mistake. At least Guy-Who-Chops-Wood (who is still the best character along with En, by the way) seems to be gearing up to play a big part for the finale.
Out of 5,
Moeronpan 
I dunno, I sorta liked this episode; just because Kinshirou’s grudge was so ridiculously petty that it seemed hilarious to me. I kinda feel like Atsushi may have slightly contributed to their broken relationship too, because he decided to just leave Kinshirou alone instead of asking what was wrong, which could have solved everything. (That said, Atsushi’s and En’s story of how they became friends is so simple yet so fitting.)
Seems like we tend to like episodes more when we aren’t the ones reviewing said episode, haha. I would probably rate this episode a three just because things are finally happening plot-wise.
It’s kinda funny to me how we started out having mostly the same opinion but now its often ‘this episode was dumb’ ‘actually i kinda liked it’ and vice versa.
and yeah I understand that the pettiness was intentional, they just could have done a better job with it, and my complaint about the poor animation and time-wasting in this episode still stands.