Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting a duet in the battle of the bands so that was a great surprise. It sounded amazing!
One thing I’m kind of annoyed about is with Banri’s situation. I guessed he would be mostly okay, but how in the world did he only end up with a few cuts and a bump on his hand when his scooter was completely destroyed. I wish they had actually shown what happened at the accident, or explained it to us. Did he swerve just in time and the scooter just flew off anyway, or did he actually jump away in time? Like Wataru, it’s normal to expect the worse when the scooter just exploded from the impact so at least explain what happened. It would have been pretty exciting to see too. ;>_>
Even though he has a hand injury, Banri was still able to perform for the battle of the bands. Problem was still with Nayuta being a petty baby and Kenta explains this to Ren alone. Ren asks Kenta to take him to where Nayuta is, so he can give him a piece of his mind! >:[
Which is Ren telling him that he likes his singing. His singing gave him the same doki feeling he got as a kid, and Ren wants to continue singing himself and go after his dream. But he also wants to sing along with Nayuta and wants to take on this challenge, he definitely doesn’t want Nayuta to just back down from it.
I suppose I can understand Nayuta’s character a little bit more after Kenta spoke with Ren, but he still rubs me the wrong way. Kenta says that the person Nayuta is angry at is with himself because he puts so much pressure on himself to always surpass himself every day. He wants to be better and wants to basically rule the world…with music! Okay Mr. Hot Shot. Sure, you can say he’s angry at himself and puts pressure on himself all the time, which is true from what we’ve been seeing so far, but he definitely redirects that anger to others as well. He’s said awful things to Yuto, he’s petty with Ren (though he turned around and did the battle of the bands), and he’s not exactly the nicest of guys in general. I get it, he strives for more, but he’s still an ass. This is still surface-level stuff, because there has to be a deeper reason why he’s so hard on himself, so until we get a reason for that, I’m not really changing my opinion about Nayuta.
That was basically the meat of the episode because the rest was all music. The duet with Ren and Nayuta was unexpected but I loved it. They both have great voices and they sound amazing together. And even though Nayuta’s style of singing is different from Ren’s, he still did Starting Over justice. We also got to watch and hear Goal Line and Manifesto, of course, and it was nice. While the background characters are ugly as sin, and the animation for Argonavis isn’t as clean, there is one thing I like about it more than Bang Dream. When it comes to the performances, there’s a lot more fun and dynamic zooms, camera angles, and pan shots. Bang Dream has cleaner animation but the performances would sometimes feel a little bland because we’d get a close-up shot of one character, another shot of another character, a side shot of someone else, back to the singer, and whatnot. With the Argonavis anime, we gets lots of zooms and different angles with Ren and the other boys, faster movements, some camera shaking. It’s the dynamic shots I kind of wanted from Bang Dream to make their performances more exciting, and they kind of did more of that in the third season (namely with RAS), and they looked great. If only the animation in Argonavis were less clunky the performances would be even better, but I’m happy with what they do. The facial expressions are pretty good too, namely with Nayuta. And just from this episode, the mixing of the blue and red lights looked so good.
A pretty good episode, the battle of the bands was entertaining. Gyroaxia announces at the end that they’re going to appear at the Destiny Rock Festival, so that’s probably going to be endgame for this anime. Next episode it looks like the boys are going to try making a music video so that should be interesting. I’m also wondering whether Banri’s hand injury is going to be an issue in the future since it looked like he was having problems earlier, and he’s definitely the type to lie about it.
