This was an improvement over the most recent episodes due to the return of some action, but it still isn’t up to the standards of the first few episodes. The creators have committed what is in my opinion the most common blunder of anime comedies— trying to add some serious plot, and forgetting that people are watching the show to have a good laugh.

I think another problem may be that the creators are overreaching with too many characters. So many of them are completely useless, and we don’t know anything about them. Namely, the ninjas on both sides, the maid corps, and the King’s honor guard are mostly useless. We’ve seen too much of these random people and not enough of Shinku, Eclair and Riko. There’s the same problem with the battles: the first couple of episodes had great fights because we were able to watch things develop on a small scale up to ridiculous proportions, with humorous banter between the combatants. The battle in this episode was just a slide show of every single character spamming AoE spells on small fry.

I enjoyed the first few episodes of Dog Days because they were funny. To make the show funny again, I think they should focus on jokes and a few of the characters instead of some prophecies, demons, and friendships between princesses. It’s impossible for anyone to take a show with this sort of premise seriously anyway.