This episode showed us more of Kimimaro’s family history. It turns out his father was also involved in the financial district, and died because he became bankrupt. His mother also passed away, leaving him to become the person hyper-concerned with money he did become. We’re also introduced to an International Monetary Fund employee investigating the financial district.

First of all, let’s give credit where it’s due: we have a show featuring the IMF. I think this beats out Stein’s Gate’s use of CERN as the secret evil organization. The IMF agent’s boss seems to be sending some rather loud double agent signals, but let’s hope things aren’t quite that obvious.

The financial district is starting to make a bit more sense, as it’s revealed that there are multiple financial districts in different countries, which I suppose explains why they mint Yen there. Also, it turns out that a battle doesn’t always end with someone going bankrupt, which answers my question from the last episode about how they have any entrepreneurs left.  It’s still unclear though how a battle can end aside from bankruptcy.

As far as the direction Kimimaro’s history is taking, it’s a bit too stereotypical for me. Father dies, mother passes away, boy hates father. The only way they could make it worse is have it turn out that Souichiro (the old guy) is actually his father. I’m actually kind of guessing that will happen though. The old man is quite sympathetic to the boy’s father. Their assets obviously have some sort of connection. And you lose your future, not your life by going bankrupt. Perhaps by losing his future he lost his family. Still, hopefully they will surprise me and do something less predictable.

What this show really needs now is some development of the two assets, and not more development of the main character. I actually liked the main character in the first episode, but I feel that somehow the extra focus on him in the last two episodes has only backfired and made him feel less real.

I was disappointed that most of this episode was spent in a battle which wasn’t nearly as interesting as the first episode’s. It wasn’t too creative either, just tossing giant iron balls around and casting chain lightning. I thought Mashu was going to do some crazy-awesome killer move and it was pretty disappointing to have her just shout the name of the technique and blow the guy to smithereens. And if she got summoned and says she’ll heal soon, am I supposed to worry about her? Overall, the battle was not interesting enough to justify all the time that was spent on it, and what makes or breaks noitanimA shows is how effectively they use their time. C is certainly ambitious enough that it’ll need to use every second it has.

A decent mystery is developing in C centering around the nature of the financial district and the Midas bank, and this is what the creators need to focus on together with the characters. I’m guessing there must be some conspiracy behind introducing Midas money into the real world. It’s surprising how common it is too. It must account for a substantial amount of the world’s currency, and one would think that the national banks would have noticed. I have my doubts that it is entirely interchangeable with actual money.

Also, how do these battles continue to happen if our main character is the only one to win his first battle since the old guy? That guy must have won his first battle at least a year ago since he seems to know so much. Yet it appears that if you lose a battle you become bankrupt, get kicked out of the financial district and lose your future. If everyone needs to battle once a week, then they must get a number of new guys equal to the current population every week to prevent the number of “entrees” from decaying. Doesn’t seem too efficient, but I suppose that’s how banks operate. I’m guessing there’s something they aren’t telling us though… are there other classes besides entrepreneurs?

The main character, Kimimaro, had an interesting background from the previous episode, but it didn’t get used well at all in this episode. He just acted like your generic protagonist who gets pulled into another word. They did have the bit about his father at the end, but it kind of just came out of nowhere.They also really need to develop Mashu, his asset, more. She’s way too bland at the moment. Hopefully this will happen in time.