Oh man, what a cool action episode. It's explodes right off the bat with Sunraku vs Rust which has the entire Nephilim Hollow community going wild.
Sunraku understandably loses. After all, he hasn't played this game in months and was fighting the #1 undefeated ranker! Rust is pissed at Sunraku for losing and we get some more of Rust's backstory. Seems she's on a quest for someone to reach her level. She wants a real rival, and I get the impression she was thinking of quitting the game right before Sunraku came back. Sunraku, the only person ever to come close to beating her. Rust really becomes a full-fledged character instead of some background NPC. Who knows, maybe Rust will end up playing SLF too!
Anyway, Sunraku tells Rust to give him a day to shake off the cobwebs and build a new Crimson Twinblade killing mecha. And of course Sunraku builds something completely ridiculous by the standards of the current meta. And it seems to work!
We were kind of spoiled this episode. We got two good fights, although the second one hasn't quite reached its conclusion. Twinblade seems like it's still capable of fighting and Rust doesn't seem like the type of person that would give up just because they lost an arm. Also, we've yet to figure out the full secret to Sunraku's sneak attack, and that one scissor claw can't be the only weapon Crab mecha has!
On a side note, I was really impressed with the animation this episode. The mecha movements felt very fluid, the background city was detailed enough to feel like background without being distracting, and the overall feel resonated "This is a video game" in my mind. I could even imagine it running on a different game engine than SLF. Just a lot of great nuances and artistic direction to really nail the look and feel of a video game.
Oh fun, we get to see the race's conclusion! All the racing finishes up after about 8-1/2 minutes. It feels a little quick given the pacing of the last few episodes but it was still very satisfying.
I expected Kanata to get 4th. There wasn't much plot about which girl he was going to pick and without that you knew it wouldn't come up. Still with all the drama they added you really didn't know which way his battle with the Ferrari would go until the very end.
Aiba's battle with Yudai reminded me of an old episode of Initial D where a racer drops behind Takahashi's RX7 because he chickened out from racing side-by-side.
The race "epilogue" was fun to watch as well. All the girls clamoring for Kanata was great. So there's Ren, Mami, and Nozomi all vying for Kanata. And that's just the ones in the immediate MFG sphere. Here's Mami not-so-subtlety showing her butt to Kanata.
@rikka@ani.social
Too bad Kanata's pockets are near useless for keeping girl's socials. Aiba getting mad that #7 kissed Sawatori was very in-character. Sawatori's aloof nature handled that exchange expertly. Aiba's expression was priceless. "What do you mean she's a highschooler?!"
I knew Ogata was going to suggest switching cars after he talked about wanting to see Kanata in a better car in an earlier episode. But I also know the whole premise of the show is "underpowered car goes fast!" so Kanata was not going to have it. Sounds like they're going to Turbo it up to 300HP so it'll still be "underpowered", which makes sense. To get to 400-500HP you'd need a very large turbo with a long spool-up time and that's not optimal for MFG races. Huh, this sounds almost exactly like a plot-line from Initial D!
We finally get to see the GR Supra rival now! It's going to be a clash of Toyotas.