Silanda

Metal Gear Discord, return of The Smooze, Trollestia, sock puppet alternate dimension, camera shaking Pinkie, Maud cracking a joke, and Tree Hugger sounding like a stoner. Best episode of the season so far!

Meh. Worst episode of the series so far. It wasn't exactly bad but it just wasn't very interesting to me and was lacking in memorable moments. It would make sense if this episode was written to push a new toy line.

I liked this one, it was the best episode focusing on Fluttershy since Putting Your Hoof Down and I even enjoyed Pinkie Pie in it. She was bordering on being Creepie Pie, what with the walking up the wall and her sinisterly grinning face popping up and down at the turkey call. Her "You kinda sounded like a dude" got a LoL from me too.

I can only speak for myself but the simple problem I have with Sombra is that, unlike the other villains, he's utterly boring: he's a simple "boo, hiss, evil" villain with absolutely no signs of depth or character whatsoever. Discord, Nightmare Moon/Luna, and Chrysalis each have character. Sombra by comparison is a mere plot device.

Personally I think it's simply season 3's weakness leads people to hold this opinion. Don't get me wrong, season 3 wasn't bad but it was a little lackluster compared to 1+2. Being half the length was bad for starters, but then we had the first two examples of blatant interference from the toy arm of Hasbro (Crystal Empire + Princess Twilight), neither of which were pulled off that well. We had a great antagonist in Discord being effectively neutered (now fixed), the presence of too many mediocre episodes, and eventually everyone's waxing nostalgic about how great the first two seasons were.

I hope so. I just find it a little strange that he's been made so low profile this season. Unlike Celestia or Luna, for example, Spike lives with Twilight, making his absence a bit glaring.

Seriously. Does anyone else miss the guy? He had a big role in Power Ponies and, er, that's pretty much it. For example: he was technically in "Three's a Crowd" but had about one line, and that's pretty representative of his role this season as a whole. Someone tell me if I'm imagining things but he seems to have been turned into a complete non-entity.

Both can pull books/scrolls from the bottom of a stack, both are partial to eating gingerbread houses, and both have curly manes. Yup, I think the hint that they are related is pretty strong.

Daring Don't. Rainbow Dash was too much of a fangirl, the pacing felt off to me, and making Daring Do a real character was predictable and possibly undermined the whole message of Read it and Weep.

I'm neutral about them to be honest. They commissioned the series in the first place, I can give them a bit of a break over the Fighting is Magic thing as they really couldn't ignore the exposure it was getting, and I give them credit for allowing licensed MLP stuff aimed at us. However, their decisions with regards to the toy line can be somewhat over-conservative even in respect to the main target audience. Products such as the talking toys with the vapid speech demonstrate a distinct disconnect between the goals of the showrunners and the toy designers, and perhaps a fear to produce any toys that aren't as stereotypically girly as possible.

The art style has evolved but it's been doing that ever so slowly since season one. It's not just a season four thing.

I liked it but with reservations. Overall this episode was decent but for me it was probably the weakest of the season so far. The danger of action episodes in 25 minute long shows is that the pacing can feel rushed, and in my opinion it did here. Since it had to go at such a pace for most of the episode there was pretty much zero character development: we know nothing more about Daring Do than we did before other than she's not just a character in a book. I really find it hard to criticize the show for this kind of thing considering the primary target audience, but usually FiM episodes don't bother me in this regard but for some reason this one did. Now, despite the episode being fluff I was impressed by the artwork. So far I'm liking the effort that has been put into new facial animations so far this season. Good job, keep it up!

Overall I loved it. I don't think it was a better opener than "The Return of Harmony" but it has gone a long way towards dispelling my fears for the quality of this season, especially with the hint of a season long story arc.

A default state if neither Celestia or Luna are controlling them? Anyway, good episodes. Certainly better than last season's opener.

It's not just the mane six. Try searching for Derpy, Cheerilee, DJ Pon3, etc. A heck of a lot of the characters I've tried have changed the colour of the bar.

I'm going to go with this too as IMHO season 3 displayed signs of increasing influence from the toy divison of Hasbro. That said, it also stood out more in season 3 due to its reduced length.

To me the bottom half looks a bit like an obi strip (I can't think of an equivalent English term), i.e. it'll be a paper section that can be removed. If not then it's a bit of an odd design if you ask me.

IMHO it'll be permanent. Given that they have built up this transformation as a symbol of Twilight's growth towards her overall destiny, I can't see how they can go back without damaging her character. As far as storytelling goes it's far easier to basically hand wave the princess elements away as simply a ceremonial thing that has little impact on day to day life, while keeping the alicorn status and growth of new abilities, than actually have to plausibly regress Twilight back to her original state.

I can't see it being released in its original form. Hasbro could give Mane6 a non-commercial license but the fact that it is a fighting game, and as such brings up issues with regards to content when viewed with respect to the franchise's target audience, makes that unlikely in my mind. That it appears to be of high quality could actually play against it too: it might be seen as competition for commercial projects. If I were a betting man I would place my money on it being released with modified character designs and all overt references to MLP removed, but in the end I suppose it would depend on exactly how hard Hasbro's legal team wanted to keep it shut down. Fan projects generally don't have the resources to fight potential legal action, even if they would likely win.

I agree and I believe that while the makers of the show probably understand this it is something that toy companies have difficulty grasping. I've been a Star Trek fan all my life, and some Star Trek toys have been prime examples of the low quality crap that companies think they can get away with if children are the primary market. Why bother putting effort in, it's for kids right? For the record, I enjoyed the episode for what it was but it seemed clear that the showrunners were fulfilling edicts from Hasbro in order to support a new toy line. It was too rushed but it left me feeling a little strange to be honest as it really had the ring of a final episode about it. That worries me because if I was an executive purely interested in toy sales, and I didn't have much imagination, I might be tempted to push for new main characters as well. It happened to an extent to Transformers back in the day, and given that the original plan in that case was to replace pretty much all of the protagonists, I wouldn't put it past Hasbro to try something along those lines.

No, I liked her episodes on the whole, especially Putting Your Hoof Down. She's also responsible for Chancellor Puddinghead and therefore a couple of my favourite Pinkie moments.

It's actually pretty common in fandom to find complaints like this in my experience. The Star Trek community had a nasty habit of doing exactly the same thing while the shows were running IIRC: complaints if the shows didn't concentrate on things requested by long term fans but accusations and complaints of fanwanking if they did.

I'm playing this game too, so if anyone wants to add me my ID is the same as my username here: Silanda. This game's kinda mean with the gems so far. I've hardly unlocked anything.

In a word, no. He was an utterly simplistic, "muh-ha-ha, I'm evil" type of villain who would probably be twirling his moustache if he had one. He was given no real background, spoke about three words during the two episodes, and just felt like a plot device inserted to give some kind of threat to the mane six. I just hope that he returns in a future episode in a way that can redeem the character, because at the moment he's kind of a let down.

I liked the episode but I somewhat agree. That said, it could have been a lot worse. I think it would be fair to guess that the whole Crystal Empire and ponies are basically something to hang a new toy range on, but they didn't go as overboard with it as I feared they might. My fear was that we'd get a plethora of new Crystal Pony characters introduced for merchandising purposes, which didn't happen. Overall I thought that the episode was decent but was trying to cram too much into two episodes. As such the villain was an overly simplistic, boo hiss evil character who wasn't explored at all and wasn't really interesting. That was the big let down for me, King Sombrero, or whatever his name is, is one of the most one dimensional characters to be introduced into the series thus far, and by far the worst bad guy.