More flashbacks and nudity.
Much like the previous episode this one has a heavy story focus primarily on flashbacks. We do still get some nudity as well as some from someone new though it’s not really major. Most of the service though is from Yumi since it’s mainly another episode about her.
Yumi and Fubuki get ready to start their battle as Yumi realizes that Fubuki has the same fan that her grandfather had. At this point Kagura tells the others some stuff about Yumi and Asuka’s grandfathers whom were partners back in the day and we get some flashbacks.
Hanzo and Kurokage finish up their mission and head to a place to eat afterwards. During this time we see Yumi’s future grandmother show up having been asked by Hanzo to join them since he knows her and Kurokage are now dating and the three of them eat together.
During a mission the 3 of them see the damage the evil shinobi did to some of their own as Kurokage vows to get revenge. Hanzo meantions how Kurokage’s parents were killed by evil shinobi explaining why he wants to kill them all. Meanwhile Kurokage comes across some evil shinobi in a parking lot and kills them all.
While Yumi and Fubuki continue their fight the others are dealing with the youma from before. They still don’t know what it is or why it is there only how powerful it is as it starts to attack them.
Back with Yumi she decides to activate her Ice Queen transformation so that she can become stronger to fight Fubuki with as we switch to another flashback.
Kurokage is yelled at by the leaders for having killed those evil shinobi when they were not on a mission. When he sees no issue whith what he did they tell him that not all evil shinobi are bad and some do work for both good and evil and those were the ones he killed. Kurokage refuses to accept this and when they threaten Yume and Hanzo if he doesn’t follow their orders he decides to leave. Later he gets into a fight with Hanzo over what happened as he tells him that killing evil shinobi is evil as well. After the fight he leaves Yume and Hanzo behind and goes off to become an edgy batman that hunts and kills evil shinobi leading to him being hunted down by both good and evil ones also.
We then see some time later as Yume is raising her newly born children from Kurokage as Hanzo helps her. She tells him that she wants her children to be proud of their father and to grow up like him. We then see more time pass as Kurokage grows older and continues to kill evil shinobi while escaping all that come hunting him down. Maybe it’s because these mature ninja setting type stories sometime have it and even though it’s not really something you would expect from Senran I kind of was hoping we would had got a sex scene between Kurokage and Yume during the episode to explain her children rather then them just appearing with no mention of her ever being pregnant in the first place. That would had been some nice service to have in this but just have to settle for the breast feeding scene.
Kurokage attends his son’s funeral and hears how his son was always given the hardest missions due to being his son and was killed along with his wife leaving Yumi an orphan. Kurokage thinks how he never even got to meet his son and goes to Yumi and explains who he is. He finds out how his family still cared about him even though he was never around and that Yumi wants to be a shinobi as well. He asks her to come live with him so he can train her and she agrees.
As Yumi and Fubuki continue fighting she activates her transformation as well when she starts to lose. In other words the usual beat the final boss’s first form and then they activate their second form. Also even though we get some nudity of Fubuki here it is near impossible to see.
I have no idea why they keep doing this annoying motion blur thing. I know I complained about it in a previous episode but as you can see there is no way to get clear frames from this as there are none. I don’t know if they are trying to mask bad art or animation by doing this or what but all of these scenes which should have some nice nude frames in them end up being a mesh of multiple different frames piled on top of each other making it impossible to get a good look at any nudity that occurs during it.
Yumi ends up losing to Fubuki as a result of her stronger form and it is during this point that she remembers where she saw Fubuki from. She realizes that she was the other girl that lived with her and her grandfather that he alse trained back then as he brought her home one day and told Yumi to think of her as an older sister.
Fubuki uses this time to announce her plan to everyone there and watching online how she plans on eliminating all shinobi both good and evil so they no longer exist. Apparently she hasn’t done her research to see that attacking your own audience doesn’t work in your favor as many others have learnt.
At this point the captured Hanzo girls are brought to the room from underground along with the youma. Yumi sees Homura and Miyabi enter with their groups chasing after the youma as they join up with her. Fubuki then tells everyone how she and that youma will now get revenge by killing everyone as the episode ends.
Another episode that is mainly used for backstory but still managed to give us nudity and even some of Yumi’s grandmother which people wouldn’t had expected. Even though most of the episode was focused on Yumi’s grandfather and his past it didn’t bother me too much that they spent an episode on that instead of the girls. Mainly because we don’t really get to see adults too often so getting to see characters in their 20s is a nice change. Also even though it will probably be a long way away before this happens in the series if it ever does in the first place but it makes me wonder what things will be like should we ever get an adult timeskip for everyone.
Eventually the series will probably reach a point in which it needs to do something new to keep things interesting and having a timeskip in which everyone is an adult and continuing from there would certainly accomplish that. Like I said though we are probably still some ways away from that needing to be done since they can probably get a number of more games out of the characters before people start wanting something different. When that time comes though I really do hope they take a timeskip route instead of just introducing more new characters and having us just accept a new group of teenagers. Having all the girls in their 20s eventually would provide a number of of new things that could be done storywise and even possibly servicewise so hopefully the series does go in that direction one day since as we saw with this episode they are capable of doing stories with adults.
As for the episode itself it feels like only a little progress was made due to these flashbacks taking most of the episode up with it mainly just being a setup for a larger fight. Next week will probably be a large battle I would guess with everyone against Fubuki and her youma before they have to retreat. Probably to the kikai dome and have that be the final battle place I would guess. The preview for the next episode also shows Katsuragi so we can assume all of Hanzo will be saved finally after next week so we can start getting service of them to make up for what they missed out on. Still hoping we get at least one more downtime/training/resting episode with everyone before the true final battle.
People would probably kill me for saying it but seeing the girls older in their 20s and introducing male characters for them to be paired up with is actually something I would want to see. People tend to go nuts at the thought of males in this series and considering how badly written most males in anime are it makes sense. However I would like to think that for a series like this potential male characters for each of the girls would be written better and wouldn’t be someone to hate for one reason or another. That probably will never happen though because it does feel like the majority of the fanbase would scream about it especially because of the whole waifu thing. But there are certainly some of us that would like to see the girls happy with a romantic partner and acting in love.
