A promising start leads to an anti-climactic conclusion. 

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I had high hopes for this episode, I really did. All three Gundams and all three members of the Asuno family fighting together for the first time in this series? A new X-Rounder ability awakening in a failed experiment and a military operation to retake Luna base reaching its turning point all in one episode? Surely this had to be one of the best episodes in the series, right? Well, sadly to say, this was one of the more disappointing episodes as a whole. It does start off promisingly enough with Seric and the rest of the Federation Forces infiltrating the Luna Base and the fight between the X-Rounders entering a new level, but from there things just go downhill and fast. 

We sorta get to see what the failed X-Rounder experiment does to Girard, and it pretty much just boils down to her abilities going haywire and uncontrollable. She manages to steal the bits from the Farsia, Ghiraga and the AGE-FX, and use them as her own as well as disrupt the other X-Rounders from fully utilizing her abilities. This puts Girard on a completely different level from the other despite her now self-destructive nature. With such power available it was almost unthinkable for Girard to lose without her power completely overwhelming her and forcing Kio—whose potential seems to outclass the others—into breaking his new found oath to not kill. That’s where this episode completely falls apart with its incredibly anti-climactic ending. The image below sums up exactly how this episode ended because it was just that: it was clumsy and wasted everything that was building up to the climax. 

This episode barely passes for something entertaining because of that ending and it left me speechless and just how poorly executed the climax was. It was a complete joke and almost insulting. The only saving grace for the ending was Kio’s reaction to his grandfather. This may be the breaking point between them and how Kio and Flit interact the next episode will tell me whether or not Girard’s death was effective for this series or not. As it stands, this episode really left a bad taste in my mouth. 

GO Rating: 2/5

Is this Kio’s breaking point with his grandfather?