When Kon gets homesick, everyone has to suffer.
What They Say:
Kon has seemed to have lost his mind and reverted back to his days as an anti-social gamer nerd. The princess has ordered Marion and Sainglain to bring him back to his senses.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
After a very, very bad episode in which it focused n Erec’s subordinates competing to see which of them was the true right hand man, Ixion Saga DT can only go upwards. Or at least I hope so. The show has been a challenge for most of its run but it’s had a few fun spots along the way that has given me hope for it finding a good voice. Episodic series can work well if they have enough to carry the individual episode, but they also need something more than that to really tie it all together and allow it to work as a whole. The show has been at its weakest there since it’s primarily just a return Kon home kind of thing, but they’ve barely touched on the way to do so other than figuring something out once they get to the Capitol.
The journey, which has no lasted about three months, is finally starting to wear thin on Kon. Enough so that he’s dreaming of what he’s missed back at home and just longing to get there. He’s even whittled himself a game controller to give him a touch of his previous life. Thankfully, they’ve made it to quite a large city and they’re taking advantage of it with some rather excellent lodgings which has great meals and an even greater bath. Sadly, Kon has gone kind of around the bend after whittling the controller and is now going back to his old lifestyle in his head, playing the games that only he can see in his room. It’s amusing to be sure, but rather unnerving for everyone else who just wants him to get back to their version of normal.
The gang does what it can to try and swing Kon back to normal since he is, as the princess notes, pretty useless like this. This has them trying to find snacks he might like, meals that make sense from his world and even comics that might entertain him but instead turn out to be porn. What helps him to turn the corner though is when Saingalin takes him gambling since that’s the cloests to gaming there is here and it’s something the men get to do together. But it’s all just prelude for the cage matches they have deep down below with a Mixed Martial Arts championship underway. While the show has had some fun moments up until that point with this episode, this just left me rolling my eyes at it since it’s such a disconnect from everything else, especially when one of the posters shows a fighter with a chainsaw. It has its moments, but this just took a decent episode and left me cold.
In Summary:
Decent is relative to the series itself though as the show is still pretty listless here as it just moves along with what it’s doing. Kon missing his home is something that certainly makes sense and getting it clear that the show is operating in a similar timeframe to the series itself, now clocking in at almost three months, it does help to spread things out so that it’s not all glomped together in a shorter setting. Most of this episode is mildly fun as we get Kon immerseing himself in his make believe world as the others tries to help him back, but it goes in an uninteresting direction towards the end when Sainglain takes him to a casino in order to enter him in an MMA match so that it can shock him back to who he is. Ixion Saga DT has always been wonky when it comes to its worldview and this is no exception.
Grade: C
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
