This was really not that great an episode. Aside from another two and a half minutes of flashback at the start, there was about a minute of Kenichi and Odin actually fighting in the first half thanks to spending most of the episodes with the Masters, and at least half of that was the magical animation technique of having people stand there and showing blurry punches all around them to symbolize attacks being made. You’d think one of those would hit since neither person moves but apparently the goal is to swing everywhere but the other person’s body. There was more in the second half, but there were still at least three times as many scenes of random grunts being beaten up as there were of Kenichi and Odin going at it. At the end of the episode, the only thing that really happened is Odin took his glasses off and is now fighting ‘for real.’ Compared to last episode where we went through every stage of Berserker all at once… well… apparently this fight is going to take a very long while.

Okay, I suppose that if you’re good with voices, you can also count learning the identity of Kensai (Kensei, whatever, let’s limit it to only one Kensei for simplicity’s sake and Ma has seniority), but really, almost nothing happened and it did it very very slowly. Kenichi almost throws Odin and later trips him, and then Odin punched Kenichi a few times using his magical “bad eyesight” power. There. I summarized the main fight for the episode. Meh. MEH!

If this episode had a budget, it would have been amazing. Without a budget though, we get recap for the first quarter of the episode, 3 frame punches repeated ad nauseum, stills with pan outs, and a shaking camera to show punch impact. It was still pretty decent, but I just remember back to the Kenichi vs Hermit fight and think of what it could have been. *sigh* There was pretty much nothing surprising here though. Hermit sees through Berserker’s berserker mode, breaks his arm, everybody goes home happy. Or gets ready to face Odin next episode, either/or. Maybe they were saving the budget for next episode. At least, I hope so.

==New ED this week.==