In the wake of last weeks tragedy of the loss of Kikawada, Mizukami is determined to get him back by any means necessary. Even if that means dropping a rather large bit of cash on the teacher to bribe him into giving some advice.
I have to give credit to Toshiyuki Someya, the actor for Soshi Momoya. His facial expressions are almost always on point. The rage in episodes 1 and 2 over the loss of his money, the greed in his eyes and on his face when he takes the money from Mizukami in this episode. There is a lot to be said for his facial acting. After getting the money, he gives Mizukami the most base advice in the world. “Train.”, yeah, that’s it. Just train your mind so you can beat the Sphinx.
To his credit though?
It’s not a half bad idea. So Mizukami settles right down and starts studying every riddle and word puzzle he can get his hand on. He becomes obsessed with trying to solve things so they can win and get Kikawada back. At long last, after a training montage it becomes time once again for their tutoring session and time once again to battle against the Sphinx.
Spudio shows up right on schedule and drags them into the 2.D world. That has now become the 2.4D world, after absorbing the energy from Kikawada.
The Sphinx shows up and Mizukami exclaims that he is ready to defeat him. So the Sphinx whips out the ‘super hard riddle’ it had been working on just for them and sets it at a five minute timer and lets the boys go to work.
God I wish I was better at Japanese word play, because these parts of the episodes are just like really confusing to me. Well long story short, they get the answer and the Sphinx explodes. Because, um, I guess it bet all or nothing on this super hard puzzle or the key to defeating it all along was just beating the riddle the first time around without losing and letting someone get eaten.
Once they are back in the real world. We get to know what Mizukami wanted to tell Kikawada.
Which was that he was in fact the one that messed with his bike. He hadn’t meant to get him in an accident though, he had meant to come by sooner and mention something and help fix the bike so they could be friends. He had never wanted to hurt him.
Kikawada is shocked of course, but he also realizes that he vanished from the world because he was the most important person to Mizukami and that he was also at fault for the bike accident because he’d failed to do a safety check ahead of time.
All is well between the two of them and the world is saved from the Sphinx and…
Wait, what’s this? The preview shows us another Sphinx, this one looks different though? It’s not over yet for our heroes of the 3D and 2D worlds!
God, this episode was a trip if only because it was really emotional to see Mizukami working so hard to get his friend back to him. There was also a lot of stuff about Oedipus and the Sphinx and why it was 4 chosen heroes.
Though if the reason the Sphinx was in the 2D world is because it slipped there after it failed to be defeated by anyone in a universe parallel our own…then what is this second one?
Also, we know what’s most important to the teacher. We know what’s most important to Mizukami.
Will we get to find out what is most important to the others?
Also, i’m not saying the idea freaks me out or anything but Spudio’s insistence that he used to be a super hot anime guy makes me laugh. If only because they couldn’t pick a decent looking rock! I’m sorry, he still looks like a clump of concrete! So associating that mess with anything attractive is neigh impossible!