Oh my… god. This episode was just utterly, utterly incredible. A worthy ending of an awesome anime.
We start of with the prologue of the great battle against Dhaos. We first see the representatives of a couple of races gather in the middle of the rain and place their trust into our heroes. Still, the soldiers are gloomy about the upcoming battle. Then, we switch back to our main party, who appears to have split up into three groups. It starts snowing, meanwhile (some of the best snow ever to be seen in anime, by the way. Muchas creditos to the animators). Cless and Mint come out of a café, and start acting nostalgic. Arche and Chester meanwhile get closer and closer to each other (figuratively, that is). Klarth meanwhile tries in the middle of the snow to talk some sense into Origin. It appears that Origin is not much of a talker, but Klarth still manages to find out that Dhaos did the things he did because he wanted to protect Iggdrasil (if I’m not mistaken, that was the giant tree from episode two). If you combine these three with each other, then the results get amazing. Even though they’re incredibly simple, they’re done in such incredible atmospheres, you can’t help but like it.
Then, the creators try to be smart and make good use of the time which was originally meant for the OP to roll in, because during the OP-tunes, the usual video-material has been replaced with our heroes combining the ring, Origin and the two swords in order to make Dhaos’ castle show up and enter it. This really shows that they make use of every single second available to them and use it as optimal as possible in order to provide as much storytelling as possible. I think that there should be more series who should attempt this.
Anyway, once in the castle, the group gets assaulted by Dhaos’ minions. A great thing to see about these fights were the actual strategy-elements which were inserted. They were especially focused on the importance of teamwork, with some terrific results. We then switch to outside the castle, where Suzu appears. Right next to her, several other ninja’s appear, apparently hostile. Suzu won’t let them pass, but before we get to see their fight, we switch back to Cless&co again. This time, the assaulting monsters get a ‘bit’ bigger and meaner, resulting in Cless getting separated from the others. He then ends up in a large mass of water, in which Dhaos tries for a final time to try and stop him with words. That doesn’t really work, even though Dhaos is partially right.
We then switch back to Suzu, who managed to finish off every enemy ninja, except for the leader (the one who appeared at the previous episode as well). That just shows how awesome Suzu can be. Anyway, it then appears that this ninja-leader is nobody else but her own father. To make it even more awesome. Despite this fact, it really does become clear that she’s even prepared to fight her own father if she had to, which was just too sad to see. At the same time, though, it only added up to the awesomeness of the episode.
Cless and the others, still separated, make their way through the castle. They’re getting pretty heavily beaten up, especially Cless, as he doesn’t have Mint with him. He then finally manages to make his way through to Dhaos’ chamber. In there, probably one of the best anime-end-boss-fights begins. Not only because it isn’t just a duel between the main protagonist and antagonist, as the rest of the team joins Cless soon, but also the way he is eventually defeated. It makes sense, sort of. In most cases in other anime, both parties try to attack with all of their powers, and finally one side ends up losing, mostly the antagonist. Variations include the antagonist winning, or both parties losing and dying at the same time. Still, it mostly ends up with a bunch of characters throwing a bunch of flashes to each other. This time, however, only one party charges to its full power, while the other clearly has trouble trying to survive. This ends in a very enjoyable climax. It’s predictable, of course, but I somehow feel the creators knew this and tried to make the best out of it. In my opinion, they succeeded.
The ending itself might be debatable, but I loved it. After all, the goal of this anime was defeating Dhaos, with the side-goal of Suzu defeating her own father. These are exactly the two scenes we get to see before the credits roll, including with two sentences explaining why Dhaos did what he did, a bit more in-depth than at the beginning of the episode. Afterwards, the episode ends. Most anime try to involve risking the life of some main character at this point, this anime doesn’t. I just loved it.
