Cardfight!! Vanguard V - Episode 39 Review

Following the end of last episode we see a very angry Ren ready to take Suiko down for turning Asaka into a zombie...except he trolls everyone including the audience by bailing the scene with Tetsu carrying said Asaka in tow because "fighting her and that zombie stuff is a pain" which got a chuckle out of me.

And then I flat out cringed when the pre op summary appeared as instead of it being around Aichi forming the club we now have Takuto saying "I'm gonna control all the fighters in the world!" with Aichi saying "I'll stop you!" while Ibuki says "not so fast, I'm gonna delete end all of you first!" in the most cringiest of ways.  I don't know what about it that bothers me so much but for the rest of this arc I'm now going to click on the 3 minute mark of any video on this channel so I can skip past all the cringy shit and irritating schilling that goes on way too long at the beginning of an upload.

So basically what I already do to anybody who plugs their Patreon at the start of a video rather than the end.

Dragons, Robots and Leg fanservice.  Many-a fetish were catered to this episode.

After the opening ends we get Kai and Miwa coming into Card Captial where everybody but Misaki, Shin and the sub-manager have been zombie'd with Kamui challenging the former to a fight.  He accepts and we finally have our Kamui vs Kai fight for this series.

There's quite a bit to unpack here as we see alot of new cards from both players with Kamui having a full Beast Deity deck (which is what he used in OG Season 2 and 3) so that's a RIP for me.  I was really hoping wave 2 Nova Grappler would have been the Blau theme.  Stern Blaukruger artwork still holds up to this day, don't @me.

That is not a tortoise good sir.

The two trade blows while Kamui's PSY-Qualia manifests itself through insight as he rides Black Tortise and throws down his hand to go on the offensive.  No new skills are revealed here as Kamui does Nova Grappler things and no triggers get flipped for either player but he's still confident in his ability to defeat Kai nonetheless.  Kai answers by riding Dragonic Overlord and doing Kai things while pushing Kamui to 4 damage while also making the declaration that his opponent doesn't actually want to fight him based on his current style.  Makes sense as I'm sure deep down in there the real Kamui wouldn't want to be fighting Kai under these circumstances.  He denies this however and rides to Beast Deity, Azure Dragon while his PSY-Qualia is instilling him with a winning vision.

Is this thing REALLY worth having Ethics Buster Catastrophe be near 20 dollars?

Azure Dragon's skill is uhh...very Nova Grappler-esque as you get to draw a card, call a unit and immediately attack with it during the Main Phase which makes it some kind of fusion of Zubat Battler, Victor and Stealth Dragon, Shiranui "Zanki" in terms of player interaction.  He's also not once per turn and has an on attack Counter Charge 1 and Restand another Rear-Guard effect.  Jesus christ that's good.  I wonder what drawback the first skill will have as this guy at least on paper seems VERY good.  This coupled with a front trigger causes Kamui to go full ham mode as Kai is desperately trying to convince him that he doesn't need this kind of power while guarding his attacks (and never hitting a defensive trigger btw) by the skin of his teeth to break the PSY-Qualia vision from earlier.  Kai tells the distraught boy that true power is something obtained through your own efforts as he rides his new boss monster; the former Imperial Perdition King and now simply a dragon known as Dragonic Overlord the Great.

Go ahead.  I dare you to ask him if he lifts.

This is a pretty big moment as DOtG in the original series was a Legion unit and that mechanic was badly handled during its heyday so when it was revealed that this series would follow the manga in which Kai has the Great as his ace (Ren also had PBA) people started speculating wildly on how the reboot would handle Legion units.  Would they discard the aspect entirely?  Or would they handle it like they did with Stride via a Lost Legend like skill that imitates Legion.  I proposed the latter to some people and it looks like that's exactly what they did here.  Great can call Neoflame from the drop zone to R and has the ability to restand itself and Neoflame after battle with Drive -1 (Neoflame also has a CB2 buff the VG by 5k and a Crit which will probably not get used that often when Dragonic Gaias can apply crit pressure for less cost) which he uses to flip a crit to close out the fight.  Here we learn a couple things; people who have been Zombie'd and have it removed will remember what they did while under its power and they also get to keep their new cards.  We get a touching moment between the two as Kamui swallows his pride to thank Kai before they turn their attention to the other Zombies in the room.

An accurate depiction of the outcome when Spikes don't see Seifried.

Back at Fukuhara High we see Ibuki defeating people left and right while complaining about being randomly challenged this day.  He finds and determines that Suiko is the cause of this and after some banter between them (in which Ibuki says that he gives no shits about Takuto's plans) the two fight.  Ugh can we get back to seeing cool new Nova Grappler and Kagero cards rather than the failure of a clan that is Standard Link Joker?  Oh, Kamui defeated Katsumi and his friends back to back (still waiting on Tachikaze to appear in the anime btw) off screen.  Lame.  Afterwards Ren and his group come into the shop as the fight between Suiko and Ibuki comes to a close and through the power of plot armour he's able to defeat her in brutal fashion.

Trying a bit too hard to be Yu-Gi-Oh! here, V series.

Suiko's defeat causes her and all of the people who were under her control to be set free however we also see that she's been left in a state that may as well be worse than zombie'd based on how souless her expression was at the end.  Takuto is less than pleased by all of this while Ibuki angrily declares that he'll delete all Vanguard fighters and the game itself as the episode comes to an end and we get a new set of credits that I'm also going to skip.  Tune in next week when we get the return of memes.