Akame ga KILL!

Episode 16

While Lubbock works towards some secondary goal, a group of robbers wait in ambush to delay Esdeath's team, and Wave merely tries to recuperate enough from the blow laid upon him to return to battle, most of Night Raid set about trying to eliminate Kurome and Bols. However, with the Corpse Puppets at her disposal (a product of her Imperial Arms, Yatsufusa), that task will not be an easy one, for they give her a varied array of powerful minions, including (to Akame's dismay) one of her former childhood friends. Her skeletal Mega-Class Danger Beast is powerful enough to induce Najenda to play her trump card, Susanoo's limited-use massive power-up, while Akame engages first her and then Bols and her other puppets keep the other Night Raid members busy. As the battle ebbs and flows, the Night Raid members gradually start to whittle down the puppets at some cost to themselves and start to gain the upper hand until Bols does something dramatic and potentially catastrophic.

One of the classic traits of shonen action series is the multi-episode battle sequence. Akame ga KILL! has largely avoided this by keeping most of its battles contained within individual episodes so far, but here we may be seeing the second major instance of the series falling back on the old shonen standards. (The first instance was the battle with the Three Beasts, but that was technically a battle in two stages rather than one continuous battle.) It staged the preliminaries last episode, takes up the entirety of this episode with the back-and-forth conflicts, and may or may not be complete at the end of this episode based on the outcome of Bols' episode-ending bit of showmanship. The Next Episode preview offers no clue on this, either, as it suggests an upcoming exclusive focus on Chelsea, though whether dealing with her backstory or where she was headed off to before the battle climaxed is unclear.

What is clear is that that is episode is intended to make up for the relative dearth of action last episode by being action-packed almost from end-to-end. Najenda, Susanoo (in his mightily impressive powered-up form), Tatsumi, Akame, Leone, and Mine all get ample chances to show off their stuff against capable and varied opponents, whether it's a whip-using former general, an ape-like warrior, a woman with twin hand guns, a yakuza-like figure with a shield, a cloaked freak, or the ninja-like childhood friend, and Kurome and Bols are certainly no push-overs when engaged directly, too. With the possible exceptions of Susanoo's dramatic power release and one character having an arm severed, nothing in the battles does anything excitingly different by series standards, and the animation quality continues to be a hindrance to producing truly visually sharp battle scenes. The only real development on the character front is how increasingly irritatingly pathological Kurome is. She is just sick and twisted, with no hint of depth at all. At least with Seryu we have some sense of what drove her into madness.

So, overall, episode 15 is merely a typical battle episode by series standards. It is enjoyable but hardly amazing and flies by without seeming to accomplish much.

Rating: C+

Akame ga KILL! is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.