You know, Mio isn’t so bad after all.
Impression
I honestly didn’t expect that demon ally that came to help out Takigawa to die so quickly – and to the heroes who came to ‘exterminate’ Mio no less. The fact that Basara struggled against him didn’t bode well, especially when Takashi then killed him without breaking a sweat – though how much of that was due to Byakko’s power I’m not too sure. The new threat is evidently the hero clan as opposed to the rebel demon faction, and they won’t be attacking Basara, Mio and Maria from multiple fronts after all – it’ll just be the heroes. Which isn’t all too comforting when you realize that Basara actually feels quite under-levelled in comparison. He edged in a win against Takigawa, and the demon that died this episode was allegedly stronger than him – which makes Basara’s ex-friends even stronger than that. Towards the bottom of the power level chart, we have a Mio who at her current level is easily brought to surrender by Basara. I don’t know how much their little foreplay session changed, but it’d better have done something or they’ll be set to lose quite fast. It was a pretty sexy Mio scene though, of all the Mio scenes we’ve had. At least it would have been, if we saw it. I wonder how much Basara realizes that he’s slowly breaking down her resistance?
Apart from based Yuki, I’m not really fans of the new heroes that were introduced. I’m sure they were written that way to begin with – they’re supposed to be antagonists after all, at least for now. They did manage to make Takigawa a bro though, and I’m not getting that vibe from the heroes at all – dangerous, maybe, but that’s about it. And it almost feels like they’re toying around with Basara and Mio, because clearly Shiba is on a different level – he was locked up for what I presume is a very good reason, and it sounds like he could easily beat them all if he wanted to. But instead, he’s making Kurumi, Takashi and a very reluctant Yuki face Basara, Mio and Maria. The only things in their favour now seem to be that they used to be friends in the past, and that Kurumi and Takashi seem to be driven by a lot of hate, which will probably work against them at some point. It must be a hell of a good barrier space if they decided to have a fight in the middle of a bridge, right after saying that they wanted to minimise casualties – considering the scale of Basara’s Banishing Shift, and the power of Byakko I wouldn’t be surprised if the barrier did in fact break. Actually, the heroes messing up and killing some civilians is the only way I can see them getting out of having to get rid of Mio, because they’d have to return to the village or something. We’ll see.
“Mio isn’t so bad”… So, I should give this a shot after all?
It depends what you want from it. There’s no need to think very hard with this, but it ever so slightly does break free from the cliche mold of its genre. That, and the fights aren’t half bad. The girls are all cute enough, and even though Mio is textbook tsundere she is slowly growing on me. If you’re in for the ecchi though, you’ll be sorely disappointed. You can’t see anything, they censor it all up.
No, no. Wariness of overuse of ecchi is why I was initially avoiding this. Your reviews were providing interesting insight on the different directions it takes from the usual. Now that I know Mio—who was involved in the description’s eye-roll-inducing contract reversal—isn’t so bad… I’m feeling better about how this will turn out!