At the end of Episode 22, it appeared that the Blume crashed into the Garm Impacter and that Daichi had woken up back in his room back at his uncle’s house as if nothing had ever happened. When Episode 23 starts, it feels like you’re going through a sense of déjà vu. When Daichi and his uncle are talking with the counselor at the school, I noticed two girls looking through the window who kind of looked like Malkin and Aiatar. This was my first clue that things weren’t what they seemed to be.

When Daichi goes to the arcade, he is approached by Amarok (who goes by Amara here), who takes the place of his friend whose parents own the arcade. When they get to Amara’s house, the girls who should have been there are replaced by Moco and Ai (aka Malkin and Aiatar). But at the point in the scene where Daichi should see the clue that leads him to Tanegashima, Ai turns off the television.

As the episode progresses, what we see here starts deviating more and more from what we saw in the first episode. The Kiltgang who try to act as Daichi’s peers try to steer him away from remembering Teppei, Hana, Akari, and the others. Despite their efforts, Daichi has brief flashes of memories of the time he spent with them. And later in the episode, he starts getting clues that begin to unlock his memory.

Basically, Episode 23 seemed to focus on an inner turmoil that was taking place within Daichi. On the one hand, through the Kiltgang characters, Daichi was trying to push the life he has now away in order to live a normal life. But on the other, Daichi’s memories of Hana and the others is pushing him to fighting for them and to save them from the Garm Impacter.

I thought the conclusion of this episode worked rather well. As we see Daichi’s inner turmoil reach its peak, Daichi makes his final decision and is able to ultimately help his comrades.

It appears that in the end, Daichi’s turmoil only lasted for a couple of minutes during the fight, but those 2-3 minutes pretty much covered this entire episode. This ended up being an interesting episode, and was better than what I was expecting. From the preview, I assumed this was going to simply be an episode that reused footage and only animating what needed to be animated in order to get Daichi back to where he needs to be. While some of the footage was reused, characters that appeared in the reused footage needed to be changed.

Admittedly, this was a trippy episode. However, it was a way for the audience to catch its breath before moving on to the final two episodes of the series. From what I saw in the preview, it looks like Daichi and the others will be up against the Kiltgang, and I imagine this could end up being an intense battle.

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