Inazuma Eleven: Orion no Kokuin | Here are My Thoughts

Orion Foundation: The Antagonist that's Sadly Wasted

If you read my opinion about Ares, you probably notice how unenthusiastic I was about their antagonist The Scale of Ares. However, it's a bit different for Orion because honestly they are really interesting. They have an understandable background, decent motive, and they actually affected the people around them--especially the main characters. When done right, their actions could really reflect philosophical and ethical concepts such as Consequentialism which basically means "the ends justify the means" which could cause interesting contrasting views to appear.

But...this great antagonist is wasted in potential because of choices that shouldn't be made.

Especially with the choice of main mastermind.

I'll be blunt: I don't like Irina as the mastermind. It's Aliea Academy all over again with the "old person is the bad guy". She lacked charm or any interesting qualities as the antagonist, other than slapping people and being a jerk. Her motivation is fine, but her execution is a stretch. How could she hack tons of government data without getting caught? Orion's powerful, but I never thought it's that powerful to get away with stealing classified data. Another thing that's not giving her any favors is that she's revealed through a series of tiresome plot twists of "He's not the villain--she is!" which made her appearance very brief and unmemorable.

To be honest, I am game if Bernard is the main mastermind of Orion. To me, he's like a younger version of Principal Asano from Assassination Classroom. He's cold, composed, intelligent, as well as possessing strong motivations. All he wanted was to keep the work of his father alive as well as help people, only to let time distort his good intentions into something that even hurts the people he wants to help. Plus, it's refreshing to see a young adult as the villain. Unfortunately, because the creators think that he's not sympathetic enough they added Irina and child abuse, making him become a pitiful wimp.

Other than that, how they cheat is hilarious. What happened in the Ichihoshi Arc/Preliminaries was awesome, but everything after that was weird or a bit of a stretch. Sleeping gas? Tear gas? Acupuncture techniques? Strange hypnosis? Food poisoning? Kageyama's methods were more threatening than those.