Minato and company are caught in Minaka's game. This is the greatest challenge we've ever faced: stairs and a long hallway! Summary: In the MBI building, Minaka declares that Minato's group has only one hour to reach the top, and Minato's group travels upwards through the stairs as the elevators are disabled. On the way, Minaka activates various traps using his PSP and uses Benitsubasa and Haihane to draw away Kazehana and Tsukiumi respectively. Good job there starting a forest fire, Homura. Back in the forest, Homura unfreezes himself and sets the woods ablaze, forcing Akitsu and Taki to retreat. Homura then gets a call from Takami telling him that the backdoor path to the control room is full of booby traps. Homura wants to get back to Matsu and Kusano, and so he runs right into the underground tunnel and has to dodge booby trap after booby trap. Elsewhere in the tunnels, Matsu and Kusano are forced to hide atop of the ventilation shafts when Mikogami and Mutsu come looking. Instead of finding their quarry, Mutsu and Mikogami run into Karasuba instead. Mutsu and Karasuba have a brief sword fight before Karasuba leaves. You can't separate a man and his toys. Main event of the episode: Musubi fights a giant rolling ball. It was a surprisingly short match. Probably should move out of the way by now. In the meantime, Matsu and Kusano makes it to the control room and shuts down all of the traps in the MBI building, but Matsu soon gets locked out of the system while Kusano strains to hold back the security bots Minaka had deployed. At the MBI building, Minaka pulls the self-destruct lever and the building starts to blow up. Benitsubasa and Haihane make a quick exit, and this frees up Tsukiumi and Kazehana. Meanwhile, Minato and Musubi are still climbing up the stairs towards the top of the skyscraper. Lots of fire but no fireworks. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Mmmm... Seven Arcs' attempt to shape up a compelling season finale is not going too well. This episode had plenty of "action", but all the fights were meaningless and the booby traps were trivial against Minato's Sekireis. There wasn't much to be impressed about, and the thing that irked me the most was why Minaka for no good reason blew up his company headquarters? I know he's an eccentric guy who likes to play games and has done a bunch of unreasonable things (including setting up the current scenario), but blowing up his own building still seems beyond his level of stupidity. They needed something to give the finale a sense of urgency, but this isn't a very good way to do it. I understand the animators are in a bit of a tough spot though. If they followed the manga, this season would end somewhere at the start of Stage 3 of the Sekirei Plan and that wouldn't have been a good finale; the story would have just been cut off and left hanging. Making good anime-original material for a manga-based series is not easy, especially for people like me who follow the manga. Having the MBI building blow up doesn't make any sense, but there is not too much Seven Arcs can do if they want to go back on the manga storyline next season. Hopefully the last episode of the season would turn out to be half-decent. From the feed of A Product of Wasted Time
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