I have no idea what the creators were thinking with this episode. Let’s start with the beginning. After Mashu and Kimimaro’s poor communication skills led to their defeat last week, they begin this episode with perfect teamwork and knowing their opponent. All of their cooperation issues from the previous episode are resolved. This could have been a good opportunity to develop Mashu’s character, whose most notable trait is that she likes ramen. But we skip all of that development and jump straight to the result. Well, it’s a short series, so maybe they didn’t have time.

Except then the next twenty minutes are spent with three different people spouting gibberish at Kimimaro (and sexually assaulting him). I honestly have no idea what the point of this was or even what their disagreement was. Something about Souichiro fighting for the present, IMF girl wanting to destroy the root of the problem, and the other guy fighting only for the future. I’m not sure how their actual plans result in these things though. Kimimaro has a big decision: let the other guy forfeit on his behalf, or fight it out. Here’s a brilliant idea for the two of them: instead of paying money to forfeit, why don’t you both just stand there and do nothing?! That would make everyone happy. But no, Kimimaro, genius that he is, decides after all of this discussion, that he must fight and win. And he proceeds to (apparently) bankrupt the guy, the one outcome that every single person wanted to avoid.

I say apparently because they skipped the only potentially interesting part of the fight. They had Mashu get beat up and bleed her black blood all over the place. Then she and Kimimaro hold hands, scream at the top of their lungs and walk forward into the light of battle… only to immediately skip over to the aftermath.

Somehow, we have romantic hints being dropped between Kimimaro and Mashu this episode, which came completely out of nowhere. I guess we can forgive the creators for this one, since we probably would have noticed if the two main characters didn’t have a net personality less than a block of wood’s. Also the IMF woman has transformed from one of the more interesting characters into a complete joke of fanservice fodder and fast food.

Overall I’m rather disappointed in the direction that C has taken. It has an interesting premise… but it hasn’t fleshed it out well, isn’t making the best use of its time, and the characters are completely uninspired. It took over from Fractale this season in more than just its timeslot.

The fights in C continue to be excellent. I was glad that Kimimaro didn’t become suddenly great at fighting since last week, but actually lost his fight this time due to not talking to Mashu. Really, I’m not sure why he doesn’t talk to her more. It seems like she would know a lot more about the financial district than him. And she’s even complaining that he doesn’t ask her. Seems like a perfect opportunity. Mashu is the weakest character of the show right now, and needs either some backstory  or more of a personality. She also needs some cool power like everyone else seems to have.

The revelations about Souichiro and the financial district continue coming in— he uses the guild money to bail out the Japanese government and buy the pharmaceutical company that failed due to a loss in the financial district. Later in the episode, Souichiro says it’s obvious that the world requires the influx of Midas money and Kimimaro agrees with him— but why do they need the Midas money? This isn’t obvious to me at all. If they’re just getting more money into the financial system by getting Midas money, couldn’t they achieve exactly the same effect by printing the same amount of normal money? There must be something about the Midas money which they aren’t telling us. Based on the name of Midas money, I’m wondering if it has some ability to make the people who touch it crave even more money. Perhaps people would be less motivated without it (although it’s unclear if this is actually a bad thing).

I suppose this episode was decent, but I’m still underwhelmed by this show. The characters are just boring. Let’s face it: the teacher from this episode, who will probably never appear again, and even the convenience store manager are more interesting than Kimimaro, Souichiro, and Mashu combined. Souichiro has the potential to become more interesting once they look into his background, I suppose. But Kimimaro is just weak, and Mashu is just there floating around inside her card and complaining.

The part of this episode about the teacher’s children was interesting. Losing your future doesn’t mean losing your life. It sounds like the suicides were actually side effects of losing something else. It’s probably significant that the main character’s father didn’t lose his wife or children. Hopefully we can avoid several episodes of emoness for being unloved by his father.

The battles in this episode were definitely nice though (especially the last one). Well, at least they looked nice. I have no idea what was actually going on since it was all economics gibberish. Since Souichiro invested in Mashu, I’m guessing that means he takes most of their profit now? Souichiro’s group seems pretty decent if they want to minimize the effects of the Financial District in the real world. Let’s hope it isn’t that straightforward and they actually have some secret evil plan. We still have no idea what the Midas money does in the real world.

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.