Stepping It Up

I've finally caught up with Critical Role, and that new intro is amazing. My favorite part is the segment starting with Percy ducking behind a tree and ending with Scanlan chasing after Pike. Percy is my favorite, so I should be upset that he had to get knocked out, right? Well, two things. One: Pike had to heal someone, I suppose, to show off her powers (except she's also a badass at everything else save stealth). Two: My personal feeling is that if I'm playing D&D, why would I want to still be human when I could be anything else? In that respect Percy is a weak link (though Taliesin rolls like a boss). Also, sometimes I would want to smack Percy upside the head for some of the decisions he makes. Vax even calls him by his last name now instead of "Percival." The costumes and effects were gorgeous, as they looked more like their characters this time around. I'm still a little bit sad Orion couldn't be part of it.

No Second Prances is a dumb title, as they directly reference second chances in the episode. On the one hand, I can understand Twilight not wanting Starlight to be friends with Trixie given what happened when Discord made friends with Tirek (though this was not mentioned by anyone, and Twlight only seemed to be doing it for selfish reasons, something which Discord would have called her out on). On the other hand, I was actually on Starlight's side for this. Twilight shouldn't have been meddling. It would've made more sense if Trixie had remembered or even known when the dinner was since she had already scheduled her show for that night and told Starlight she couldn't go. I guess they wanted to play up Trixie's history with Twilight instead. "Way to go, dum-dum." Another thing to consider is that Celestia shouldn't have cared whether or not Starlight and her +1 showed up. Instead, we see her very annoyed at being left at the dinner with Cranky, Vinyl, and Derpy as company. And where was Spike during all this? Fluttershy was also underutilized, being abandoned by Starlight, who left after petting Angel (who loved it/her). Andrea Libman even got credited only as Pinkie, as all Fluttershy got for dialog was sighing and gasping. The other ponies whispering and rejecting Starlight and Trixie was a little reminiscent of when it happened to Sunset in Equestria Girls 2, but the two of them together made it uniquely theirs.

It was nice to see Sailor Mercury in action, albeit briefly. It was actually even nicer to see Mamoru and Usagi be constructive in their relationship. Chibi-Usa's end theme was a bit jarring, as it seemed too bright and childish (even though that's her character). When she was talking about how her mom had the chalice since she was young, an abridged option would have been for Rei or someone to blurt out, "Whoa! Spoiler alert! We don't have that yet!"