OP Sequence
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OP: 「キミへ ムカウ ヒカリ」(Kimi he Mukau Hikari ) by 新居昭乃 (Arai Akino)
Watch the OP! Mirror 1 and Mirror 2
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Summary:
After the kiss from Shizuno, Kyo finds himself alone in the pool. He’s talking to his friends later outside a convenience store about her, but they don’t know who she is. Time is acting weird, as his friends disappear one by one. The scene then changes to the classroom, where Kyo finishes his chemistry midterm before anyone else (and apparently perfectly). In the hallway, he thinks he sees Shizuno, but when he chases the girl down, it’s just someone who looks like her. After some swimming at the pool, Kyo is confronted by Kawaguchi and his two friends. They tease him about his looking for Shizuno and then Kawaguchi proceeds to beat Kyo up. Kyo raises his fists but doesn’t fight back. It seems that they all used to be part of a swimming medley team, but it got broken up because of Kyo. Floating the pool, a bruised Kyo yells for Shizuno, but she doesn’t actually appear until he’s in the shower. The two of them are transported onboard the Celebrum organization’s Oceanus ship. The commander of the ship is actually the student council president Shima. The Zegapain Altair is sent to help the Zegapain Garuda, and Kyo is able to take out the first wave of flying enemies with his gun. The Altair is then attacked by three Anvarl types. He scores direct hits on two of those, but has to take out the third with the Altair’s fist. Before they go back to the real world, Kyo asks Shizuno about the kiss, and she responds by hinting that their relationship is like that. Shizuno ends up doing the promotional video for Kyo, and lots of people come to watch. They all seem to know who she is now – an exchange student who came a week ago. Ryoko tries to capture Shizuno’s smile, but she only does it after looking at Kyo.
ED Sequence
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ED: 「リトル グッド バイ」 (Little Goodbye) by ROCKY CHACK
Watch the ED! Mirror 1 Mirror 2
They moved the OP to its rightful place, and the images changed slightly. When I talked about it last week, I didn’t think the song fit very well as an OP (it would be terrific as an ED), but it’s really been growing on me. Anyway, the actual ending song, by ROCKY CHACK, does it’s job of closing out the episode very nicely.
This episode has a lot of clocks, and there was a lot of moving back and forth in time and everyone’s memories kept getting altered. They seem to be hinting that the world that Kyo is in is the virtual one whereas the “game” may be the true world. This premise is reminiscent of The Matrix, but with mecha. We also get introduced to Lucien and Mei Yen, who are piloting the Zegapain Garuda (which looks almost exactly like the Altair but with different colors), and we also get to see the launch sequence for the Zegapain. I can see that becoming stock footage very soon…
I enjoyed the episode overall for all the ShizunoXKyo moments, but the battle was a bit lackluster. Nothing really interesting happened during the fight other than Kyo blowing up bad guys. And on that thought, the explosions are the weakest part of the otherwise great animation; they remind me of the crappy ones that were in Tactical Roar. So there’s certainly room for improvement on the fighting end, but the rest of the episode is pretty solid.
