January 05, 2004
Full Metal Panic! Episode 20
"Venom's Flame"
And here we go into the action! Okay, it's a little understated in this episode, actually. There's some action, but Mithril's AS's take care of business so quickly it's kind of anticlimactic (guess those new Russian AS's weren't that big of a deal after all). It does still bother me, though, that the AS's seem to have such widely varying degrees of manuverability. In one scene, we hear them plodding along, ungainly, and in the next, they're defying the laws of physics by sliding around, running, diving, etc. Ah, the realities that are mecha shows.
Either way, giving a mecha a knife to hold in their hand seems kind of silly.
We're at episode twenty at this point, so I'm not really expecting any big surprises. The animation is still exceptional and the music adequate. The thing that bugged me, as I said above, about this episode is the actual battle itself. There's a lot of foreshadowing about how if Sousuke can't complete his mission, it'll be bad news for everyone involved, but even Gauron doesn't seem to put up much of a fight.
Except that the AI cuts out on Sousuke for some, as-yet-unknown, reason. Not to mention that Gauron seemed to have given up pretty easily (it just took a building collapsed around him).
I'm expecting a surprise next episode.
Rating: B
Posted by Kei at January 5, 2004 11:54 PM