Episode 6's budget nosedives horrifically in a way rarely seen nowadays, but thankfully the series manages to drag itself back out of the crater in fairly short order. After that initial burp, the fights become even more absurd and brutally, beautifully kinetic, to the point where they've pretty much ruined me for other shows.
While the fights are all serious business, pretty much everything else is strange as all hell. I'm way past the point where I can take fighting-anime plots seriously, and AM's apparent allergy to coherent narrative or characterization is a refreshing change from expecting me to actually, like, respect the internal logic of the story of a teenage gymnast turned antigravity street brawler. In this series, any damn thing can happen, and usually does. In fact, this block of the series has multiple arcs that start as oddball one-off fillers that randomly just refuse to end, and derail the show for several episodes.
The other thing this run of episodes has is plenty of Kaori Sakiyama. As commented last time, Kaori is that rarest of anime characters, the comic relief "rival" who becomes awesome in her own right, mainly due to sheer psychotic force of will (and occasionally channeling Devilman Lady). She is quite probably the best character in the series to date, even beating out the perpetually hung-over invincible gigolo. Cannot wait to see how this insanity ends.
