Impression:

Well, I guess the season finale wasn’t as anticlimactic as it could have been. I refer to this as the season finale because the story is obviously not over yet and the episode ended with a new letter falling down which would signal more adventures. The fights were pretty interesting. Everything focused on the three battles that were established in the last episode and the whole destroying of the stained glass was pretty much pushed aside. I guess the biggest problem that I had with the final battle was the fact that the fights were so short. We didn’t need an entire season to cover the game itself, but we could have gotten a little more than one episode for the fight with the demon lord. Asuka’s fight had some real potential with Deen taking on the Stroms, but it was way too short. It was cool how the mech overpowered those crazy looking things, but I could have blinked and missed it. Izayoi’s fight was nice in the sense that it was far more even than usual, but you couldn’t really tell that from the fight itself. Had they not thrown out an arm injury and a statement by Izayoi regarding the evenness of the fight, I would have said that Izayoi simply punched his way to victory again. The two actually engaged each other less than ten times and each of those were one shot and a fallback. Also, could we do away with the whole “no hard feelings because you were a great opponent” thing? When the flautist and the true Pied Piper went down, there were no hard feelings and words of admiration being tossed around. People died. Can we let that force some bad blood please? The fight with Pest was interesting enough. I really got what I wanted when it comes to Izayoi not being over powered because it took four people and three crazy gifts to finally take her down. We got sent to the moon, the spear from earlier came into play, and the fight was somewhat satisfying. Admittedly, it could have been longer, but it was the best of the three fights. Next, I must admit that I was wrong. Some of the members of Salamandra were behind the demon lord’s game, but it was not intended to dethrone Sandora. It was an attempt to give Sandora a good reputation as a new floor master. Taking on a rookie demon lord would help keep down the level of difficulty and the nature of this world forces things like this to be necessary. Izayoi confronts the older brother about this and warns him that they better help out the no names if they ever get into trouble because his friends could have gotten hurt. An alliance has formed.

I did not expect to see a visit to the moon.

Current Opinion of the Show:

That was pretty damn good. I definitely think that Mondaiji was a highlight of the 2012-2013 winter anime season. The action got really good and definitely need to see more of that. Hopefully, we may be able to see a fight that lasts more than thirty seconds and isn’t half talking, but it was a good start. The universe that was created in this show is one that is complex enough to keep your interest because you don’t know what will happen next, but it isn’t so convoluted that you end up scratching your head due to confusion. Overall, the characters are great and this is a show that needs a second season. Not in like a few years, but as soon as possible. On a side note, I could have done without all of the “we are going to grow together” stuff at the end. Some is nice, but less is more.