This episode focused on some insane battles between the Drifters and the Ends, while also filling us into the motivations of the two Ends the episode focused on. Most of the episode was battling
and answering many questions about Jeanne D’Arc that I previously had. Because this was 90% fight scenes all I can really remark on is how cool the fight scenes were. We finally see the Octobrist mage put her magic into use and this is essentially what allows Toyohisa to obtain victory over Jeanne, who we have seen previously possesses obscene fire abilities that correlate to her backstory, and ultimately assist in the destruction of de Rais, the spearman who is revealed to have been a former follower of Jeanne. Toyohisa created a lifelong enemy by refusing to kill Jeanne once he realized she was a woman, and I’m torn on that. At first I wanted to roll my eyes at the archaic ‘of course he won’t kill a woman’ before I really thought, well honestly he spent several minutes before that praising a woman for saving his life and assisting him in battle. His disrespect for Jeanne seems to come from her dawning armor and ‘pretending’ to be a warrior, which I’m not excited he did but that I can accept. Toyohisa is an archaic warrior and he doesn’t go out of his way to shit on all women, so I can’t really hold a grudge against him. Jeanne does, however, and that’s hilarious because that means he has made his life harder by refusing to kill her and allowing her to get out alive.
Every episode that Nobunaga does something and remarks on the nature of how to win war battles I enjoy the show much more. I don’t know what it is about watching Nobunaga win, but seeing him competently describe his battle plans and lay down actual explanations for how things work makes me especially eager to continue watching. He is a great leader to the elves and consistently teaches them worthwhile strategy. On top of it we finally got to see Yoichi do something more than just sit on the sidelines and make gags, he was able to fight de Rais this episode and put up an honest to God good fight. On top of it the animation for this was so perfect and the atmosphere was excellent, the bolded lines on his face made me eager to take 50,000 screenshots just to further observe the nature of atmospheric shading and how the light was perfectly cast in each shot, demonstrating superior animation skills alongside superior coloring abilities. This episode left me saying ‘oops, my art major is showing’ on multiple occasions.
I don’t dislike Toyohisa by any means and I’m glad he is consistent in his behavior, but he does give me slightly less fangirlish glee. The other characters literally shot a man to death with a machine 
gun so how can I say the whole no chopping off a woman’s head thing even comes close? Look, I don’t care about his views in terms of the fight scenes. All I’m saying is he needs to go back to some fierocious sword maneuvers and chopping things off like he did before and I’ll enjoy his scenes more. Where is the payoff, dammit?! Add on that I was feeling so bad for Jeanne when it’s outright shown that she is an End because she was abandoned in death even though she fought for God, even seeing the people she fought for as zombie like creatures that had betrayed her, and it made it hard to appreciate how clever he was being. (Though come on, that trajectory had to be perfect, are you telling me he had time to freakin’ math that shit?) de Rais’ fight was much more entertaining and I felt a lot for him as he revealed he would sin in order to go to hell with Jeanne, and how even now he wishes to wait for her in hell since she has fallen so far.
Damn, Ends, you tragic.
Oki