Also, waifu armor.
Nobuo is now aware that Yumeria, now going with her real name Yuko is now married. Also, Baros LOL unleashed the power of Smartphone Monger whose abilities turned Aoi-tan into a yandere kind of character! To make matters worse, he can force someone to learn some spoilers!
For starters, Luna barely appears in this episode because she finds it a waste of time being with the Akibarangers. To put it simply, we can just ignore her later appearance in the said episode. But our heroes can't just ignore her thanks to the Smartphone Monger! Just like the MOTW from last week's episode, he is based on a motif from a past Super Sentai monster; in this case, he is a Black Magma monster from Sun Vulcan. Because of this, I am starting to wonder what will be the motif of next week's monster.
The first fight with the Smartphone Monger and his troops is seriously amazing. I just love that they featured a couple of editing techniques used during the 80's. But this fight also made them realize the importance of a third member. So yeah, they were badly beaten up and to make matters a bit worse, Nobuo noticed that Malsheena is holding a black version of their MMZ-01! And of course, Malsheena transforms becoming... a Malsheena with a much skimpier outfit.
The first thing I noticed about Malsheena's new form is that during the fight scenes, you can clearly see some obvious skin tone clothing being used. In short, her actress is not doing most of the stunts. The only time you can see her actress in action is during when they will have some close-up fight scenes and that's about it. It is also during this time wherein we saw Smartphone Monger's spoiler downloading abilities and for an otaku to know some spoilers, he or she can handle it in various ways. In Nobuo's case, he hates it. To add up the injury, it is about the upcoming Aoi-tan movie.
Because the power of spoilers is too much for Nobuo to handle, they are forced back to the real world and learned that Aoi-tan had a lot of major changes. She is now a yandere, people find her show too violent and as for Hakase, guess the anime series is not anymore popular and that she is not anymore paid with the necessary loyalties. Because of these changes, I am starting to wonder, how the heck the events in the Delusional World affect reality? I mean, we saw in the first season that there are only minimal effects, but nothing as major as this or that in the previous two episodes.
This is when the side plot about Yuko's new family comes in, earlier in the episode we learned that Yuko's mother-in-law is strict when it comes to otaku activity, and she wants to draw her new BL doujin. This is when Nobuo comes in as her assistant to prevent Yuko's mother-in-law to learn her "rotten" otaku activities. Well it kinda makes sense, I mean she is married to a man and once her mother-in-law discovers that she is into yaoi... I am not sure what will happen next if she gets discovered.
So for most part of this episode, Nobuo acts as Yuko's butler, do some stuff to get her pumped up to draw more BL while at the same time, keep Yuko's mother-in-law in discovering her BL stuff. It's one entertaining scene because it reminded me how most high school kids try their best to hide their stash of that stuff. Its fun to watch it and it shows us that Nobuo can be a little creative when it comes to creating excuses.
Finally, Yuko is done with her BL manga, which turns out to be a doujin made just for Nobuo who is a bit down thanks to the Smartphone Monger incident. Based on his facial reaction, it is one satisfying doujin made for a fanboy like Nobuo. But there are still problems when it comes to the Smartphone Monger and thus, our heroes transformed and now back in the Delusional World! But the biggest surprise is Luna's sudden appearance. I guess it has something do with her dropping a visit in her agency. Whatever she did there caused Luna to transform into AkibaBlue. But I guess this story is reserved for another day.
Anyway, the moment that I've been waiting for is finally here! After they were beaten up a couple of times by Malsheena and the Smartphone Monger, it is time for Nobuo to unleash his delusions with his waifu, Aoi-tan! Said delusions thanks to the doujin Yuko created caused our hero to cross the boundaries between 2D and 3D! For starters, the animation for some of the 2D scenes feels a bit stiff, but hey, this is modern Toei and most of their recent anime productions are kinda stiff when it comes to animation.... unless if it is a movie.
The equipment scene of Nobuo's waifu armor looks great and it makes you proud that finally, Nobuo broke down the walls of 2D and 3D, and now he is with his waifu! It is a moment that I am waiting for a long time now. As for the performance of this new armor, it just made Nobuo more conscious about protecting it rather than use it to protect himself. But hey, this is a waifu armor and we men should protect our waifu! Lastly, Super AkibaRed's new weapon one heck of a finisher and it perfectly fits well with the waifu glomping theme AkibaRed's waifu armor has.
At the end, they defeated the MOTW and to make things even better, as it turns out, Yuko's mother-in-law is an otaku and an anime singer as well! Oh, and the ending theme of this episode is the theme song of Ninja Captor's Akibaranger counterpart, the Ninja Cap-tan! What's interesting about it is that the one who sang the theme song as sang the theme song of the original Ninja Captor theme. So yeah, she is no other than Mitsuko Horie, the one who sang the Voltes V theme that always pumps up my afternoon every time I watch the said TV series back then!
