Kyoukai Senki episode 25: End of the War

The final episode of Kyoukai Senki is out. And we reached the climax of the long and arduous journey to reclaim Japan of the young trio Amou, Gashin and Shion. The result is…well, a textbook honest-to-goodness Sunrise ending that played it so safe there’s nothing else to get excited about.

The episode started with the continuation of the duel between Ghost/Brad/Brady Phantom and Amou/Gai/Kenbu Zan. To be honest, it went about as much as we expected. Although at first, I did expected Reiki and Jogan to provide another c-c-combo breaker support like season 1, but I guess that was a true man vs beast fight, while Brad is an actual man with a burning passion and ideology. Making this a 1-vs-1 fight is a more poetic approach. Of course the other two ILeS lent a hand to show some camaraderie but mostly just to keep Gai in the fight. Although that was a literal asspull right there. If Amou shed a tear and it drop onto the cockpit’s floor and Kenbu reactivated I would flip the table lol. At least the first half of the episode was filled with some beautiful mecha animation.

And of course, Brady got beaten by the power of friendship. The series pulled a Graham Aker and made us “believe” that he’s dead and his motive will never be cleared and that he was a man possessed bla bla bla. But nope, Kyoukai Senki instantly turned around and show the man all good and patched up in a hospital. The war is resolved in the dumbest way possible (basically the same as Egao no Daika). The bad general get arrested for his crimes and the NAC are suddenly reasonable people now. Prob cause their entire advanced AI army got shafted by a single woman writing some mad code.

Peace talk was achieved and I guess Japan is sorta-kinda liberated? But isn’t this literally back to square one when the economic blocs first came to Japan? They still have a hold over New Japan’s economy and can collapse it if they wanted to. Of course Yatagarasu and all the other Resistance organizations will try to prevent that but the situation isn’t very ideal. And German…oh boy. Turns out there’s no-one else that got shafted with him. His backstory is interesting but he’s a massive loose end that really need some work instead of just: he’s a merchant of death, he got arrested and that’s it. There are so much more potential with German but he got put down like a noob.

My guy Brad turned out to be…a conscious dude. He wasn’t “taken” control of by Ghost or anything, he just want to do some stupid atonement for the stuff his father schemed. The entire conspiracy was explained and it was pretty basic for the most part even though the build-up was very mysterious and interesting. It would be really cool to see Brad having some contingency plans instead of planning to commit a Kamikaze sortie. But oh well, you can’t have everything.

Anddddd that is the end of that. Everyone got closure and began their new journey on a new Japan. Gashin will continue working with Yatagarasu, Shion will rebuild her grandpa’s Himeno Wares in her hometown and Amou – of course – will be travelling across Japan and possibly the world with, you guess it, a “clean copy” of Gai since he was 99.99% wiped in the battle with Ghost (if you think he’s gone then you clearly haven’t watched enough mecha).

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