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「花に嵐」 (Hana ni Arashi)
“Flower and Storm”
All right I have to say it, the combination between the conduit of dramatic story and card battle, made this episode stand on point for me. First off we got some more backstory on the mysterious girl figure that made an appearance last episode, her ambiguous entrance made all the more sense this episode, as it was revealed at the end that she’s more than just someone Teruto used to play Build Divide with in the past. A childhood friend? Not at all. She’s actually his little sister, and rightly so, it makes so much sense, Teruto got destroyed in this episode. He couldn’t even form a strategy against her or make some sort of counter-attack, the stakes are set and they are soaring.
It was really interesting to see Teruto squirm his way through this battle, and slowly be shown more and more of his past with this mysterious girl. Her name revealed to be Kikka (Serizawa, Yuu) not only that, she’s the current king ruling over the Build Divide world. And this episode showed exactly how strong she is, this episode truly made a mirror out the whole angel’s and demons thing these two brothers have going on. Kikka clearly uses a deck full of angels, so there must be some type of way of defeating them, there must be some type of weakness, then again from what I’m seeing Build Divide is sort of broken, prioritizing making the game fun over having lots of mechanics that interact with each other. Then again my knowledge of TCG’s is very limited to Yu-Gi-Oh, Duel Masters, and the Pokemon TCG, so I wouldn’t really know. And Build Divide has different rules and nuances, of course, so again I wouldn’t really know. I can only speculate from what I see in the anime. If you’re interested here is a full rundown of the rules (Japanese).
It’s interesting, the story Build Divide is offering, it’s slowly setting up its mystery, and apparently without fail it’s promptly trying to give answers, even though if it dilly-dallies a little bit on Teruto and Hiyori’s shisho relationship, presumably they did manage to beat up all of those student’s fighting over who should get what piece of bread. And hey who would know that bread would be an actual plot point in this episode, instead of betting chips, Kikka offers Teruto some croissants over the battle. I did like however that at the beginning of the episode some time was spent building up an interesting cliffhanger before the OP dropped, as episodes progress more and more anime just doesn’t care to build up an interesting premise, they expect you to be engrossed whether the opening hook is attractive or not. But it was all about bread! I just can’t get over that, the real plotline of this episode was all about bread! Bread!
I did notice the animation blundered a little bit during some scenes, but it was okay, nothing to write home about or anything. Another little thing I should add is the addition of a new judge mechanic that made the battle stand on its toes. Really interesting stuff, as it seems more rules and mechanics could be added as we go along with the program.
It’s not much later that Kikka appears with a mask on her face, trying to hide her identity, but blunders rather quickly delivering who she actually is during the battle. One thing I did notice is that the robots and projector walls didn’t appear, instead, a mysterious shrine projection surrounded all of them rather quickly. I’m guessing those are the powers of the king, she can do whatever she wants, even if some people are not happy about it. Isn’t it rather creepy that Kikka keeps a Teruto doll all to herself, that she squishes rather hard? And she did mention a couple of times that Teruto should only have eyes for her, she is his little sister and all, it is a little weird. I’m just hoping Build Divide doesn’t go there, but instead shows us that there was some actual drama between Teruto’s family and all of his memory loss thing could be derived from something actually happening between them. It’s a plot point I can’t wait to figure out more of. Nevertheless, Build Divide continues to be interesting and shows’ potential to advance on a slow burn towards a fruitful endeavor. Let’s hope it continues on the right path!
End Card
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