Expectations have not been fulfilled.
Between lackluster King Hassan scenes, anime-only additions, and generally poor quality outside of Noble Phantasms, I’m frankly disappointed.
Where do I even begin with this? Hassan had his moment but most of his attacks barely felt like they had any impact to them and his animations looked so uncanny. Maybe it’s because we’re so used to him or that the animation homogenizes the artstyle but whatever imposing figure he had in the last seconds of the previous episode is gone because he looks too soft to look at now. Let’s not mention the fact that his presence is hardly felt throughout the episode as most of it was flying around in highspeed chasing down these incredibly photogenic Lahmus. Also Hassan wants to eat lahmus for whatever reason which I found a bit more detrimental towards his incredibly composed stature than adding to his general presence.
Speaking of said photogenic lahmus, most of the episode involves fighting them off while the rest of the cast try and hold Tiamat. If nothing else, they decided to earnestly pull off that penultimate fight before Tiamat’s proper boss fight where you fight a wave of Lahmus, who at that time, had no class weakness so you had to actually fight them head on, with maybe some instant death tricks here and there with support King Hassan. I’m not sure I liked how the anime kept cutting in between all the fights however since the anime split the party up instead of dealing with it sequentially.
The finale of it all giving Guda the cinematic run towards Tiamat isn’t necessarily something I really liked either and it definitely came across as a shoe-in scene to make him more relevant since all he really does is stand around. Gilgamesh’s GoB’s effects also felt a lot lacking compared to how they usually sound. All in all, the individual pieces for the episode had the potential to be great but awkward decisions, pacing, and scene to scene direction felt all over the place.
Lair of the Idle 