Well, there’s a degree to which this was inevitable. Something of a surprise it was so soon.
This episode is pretty much just Goro v. Aki. We get more of Aki’s background, he pranks Goro, Goro defends him to Lall getting more of their background as friends, and finally after reconciling the prank Aki and Goro engage in open combat when Aki attacks.
Aki’s full power is revealed to be much more impressive temporal manipulation than five seconds of foresight, as he can unleash summoned objects from the past in order to affect the present, as well as displacing objects in time. He uses this to disable the activation of Fool’s Sutra several times before using the cord his mother used to hang herself to hang Goro.
While dying, Goro and Lall connect somehow deeper, pulling out a second level of Fool’s Sutra that turns it into a staff and evidently lets Goro affect reality without the same sort of regard (as it undoes all his wounds), which can un-happen Aki’s phantoms from the past. One of the sort of reality erasure blasts, in addition to eliminating a phantom train meant to run him over, also takes out about half of Aki, ending the fight in a bloody mess.
Goro, quite reasonably, has a hard time processing that he’s forced to fight his friend to death and kill him. Which I will grant, even if repeating myself that he needs to not stay just fully weepy. Dying, Akitsu reveals his motivation: on getting his power he saw countless possible futures, and the only one that wasn’t crap involved Goro forging ahead. So, presumably, this whole battle was to an extent an elaborate suicide to bring that future around. He also says that there will be a second and third Akitsu, which when his power was time manipulation I suppose makes sense and gives us more material to work for the run time of the show, however long that ends up being.
So, what can I really say on a constructive level that I didn’t cover in episodes 1 and 2? The animation, I’ve gone over. If you hate conspicuous CG you’re going to hate it, if you’re more open to the idea it’s still idiosyncratic. The plot is still doing mostly Mirai Nikki and Fate/Stay Night stuff, with the needle this episode pushed farther towards Mirai Nikki as opposed to last episode veering more in a Fate sort of direction.
For this episode in particular, the tightness of the focus was noticeable. I’ve called it out before, with the grayed out mobs forcing a tight, almost claustrophobic focus on our leads, but Haruka doesn’t even appear in this one, it’s just Aki, Goro, Lall, and very few faceless mobs.
Speaking of Lall, that’s a character I haven’t talked about much except to say “oh, that must be Murmur”. We’ve actually gotten a bit more out of Lall since then, including the fact that Lall is an incarnation of Goro’s power and that Lall has a kind of ruthless attitude towards the game. This episode does address that latter count some, with it coming out that Lall seems to be worried for Goro, and be inclined to take the paranoid stand out of care and concern. This fact is supported by the fact that Lall does at least look somewhat concerned when Goro is talking about how important Aki is to him, seemingly weighing how that matters.
Before the next-level Fool’s Sutra, there’s a somewhat cryptic voiceover I think was Lall, talking about “just want[ing] to be born normally” which seems like setup for some later significant twist or reveal. From this point forward, I do think it makes sense to start treating Lall more as a full character rather than an accessory, especially since someone or something is going to have to step in to the void of interactions that Aki is leaving behind. Now, that could be Honoka or it could be Second Aki, but it could also be Lall
So, for this week, that’s where I’m going to leave things. We’ve still got a lot of characters to introduce (or properly introduce, in the case of Green), a crazy cleaver chick to manage, and a death game for godhood to participate in, so presumably Jin and Yoko Taro have somewhere to go from here.