So 19 and 20... seem to have a pattern for me with Reiwa and being like my least favorite episodes of every show?

These episodes... I'll be honest but real estate is boring to me. Maybe make it home decorating or something like, Humagears designing houses horribly and people complaining about that? Now that's entertainment! I can listen to people all the time listing terrible home designing things! I have seen people on podcasts talk about how their homes are terrible and who designed them? And why would they rent out this house if it was awful?!

Selling houses though? Not my thing!

Saber's 19 and 20... kinda boring overall aside from a few nice notes and Revice's 19 and 20 end up being the most out of place episodes in the entire show in retrospect. So yeah, Reiwa and the numbers 19 and 20 are weird for me!

That being said I did actually really like the confrontation between Aruto and Arayashiki at the end. Probably my favorite of all the fights in this set of episodes tbh.

Yeah, this episode is kinda boring, it's not my least favorite this arc, but it doesn't feel like anything changed from two episodes ago, even including Hiden losing again, but still winning the moral point, as you call it. I don't have much to say on this episode, but the next episode, I have rather strong feelings about, but for this episode, it's perfectly mediocre and would probably land a 5/10 if I had to rank the episodes like that.

Man! Disagree! I found both of these episodes to be high-points in the series, a nicely complicated exploration of the promise and peril of automation. I'm sorry they didn't work for you, but, wow, I would happily watch a whole lot more of these types of stories.

Agree! Just another really good solid episode that underpins what I liked about Zero-One. Kinda wish I had more to say but you kind of got it all already. I do think Horobi's current status of former-mob-boss-tied-to-a-chair is really funny

It's great that Aruto and Smile were able to get through to him and make him realize within himself what really matters to a home...even if it feels like the moral victory over the actual competition victory seems a little more hollow because of how much Arayashiki personally wrecked their chances with the Raider attacks and he still won.

Of course Thouser prioritizes the Magia over the Raider. Are things starting to feel a little repetitive? Yeah. At the same time I feel like on some level that's also reflected in what the actual protagonists must feel.

I guess Assassin-chan kind of demonstrated how there can be multiple Humagear's of the same body and face composition for various works, although at a point where you have Humagears making construction such a cinch, the whole automation versus humanity argument gets a little murkier. Which I guess is kind of the heart of the series' current conflict.

Nobody told Fuwa that he'd have to actually solve crimes when he joined AIMS to kill robots.
Feels like a disservice to Zero-One's base forms to be honest...

It's nice to see that even after being briefly dead, Horobi has zero fear of or respect for Fuwa. Horobi's just stuck in this chair being absolutely no help, and kind of loving it? It's my favorite version of Horobi so far, and I sort of hope he never gets freed. It's great.

I legitimately hope we get at least one scene in this arc of Fuwa sheepishly asking Yua for the tiniest bit of insight on this case. He's tried nothing, and he's all out of ideas! Also, I just want to feel like Yua is something other than ZAIA Izu. She didn't even Henshin once in this two-parter, that I can recall!

On the topic of AIMS Is A One-Man Operation Apparently... I'm not sure taking down Arayashiki is actually in Fuwa's jurisdiction? AIMS is mandated to prevent AI crimes. That's what the first two letters of their name stand for. Arayashiki is a human criminal, and Fuwa knows that. He likely isn't empowered, legally, to apprehend or attack a human suspect. I kind of hope that limitation gets explored at some point?

So fun fact, the old guy who the final sale comes down to is a Tokusatsu alumnus. He was previously Emperor Zero, the main villain of Kamen Rider Amazon (and the only Showa era big bad to to be an actor, rather than a voiceover) and Mason, one of the villain mini group the Big Three (along with Farrah and Monster) in the Sentai show Choudenshi Bioman.

He did threaten to arrest the guy who made a Humagear who looked like the guy's dead daughter, so it's a bit unclear on when and how AIMS operates as a police unit. Probably for the best too, since I imagine a deep dive would just raise alot of questions that kids most likely aren't concerned about.

I thought that bit was fairly clear -- they deal with AI-related crimes and that includes any humans involved in them. As a government agency they also probably have some basic allowances to investigate people etc, otherwise they probably wouldn't get very far into most AI-related crimes without being constantly accompanied by normal police

What I remember most about this episode is that it’s the debut of Aruto’s ultimate counter to a Humagear going berserk: hug it around the waist and scream its name until it stops being a monster. Does it work? No. Will it still be his immediate go-to response? Yep.

(In fairness, it may have shown up already, but this is the episode where it really started to negatively stand out to me)