To me that was fine, like I sort of interpreted it as: first they tried to let the professional (purple coats) handle things. When that didn’t go well it cut to the students pointing and discussing, so I would imagine they were strategizing / buffing (similar to their Blue Lizard fights). Though I guess it is weird to let the enemy (supposedly) power up as well, it did work out in the end, so I’m like, you can’t really blame them, maybe they needed that time to win too, we can’t say without knowing what would’ve happened if they didn’t prepare.

Edit: Thinking more about it I can agree with you that it could’ve been better. Even if they didn’t animate some generic fight scene in the background I think they could’ve improved it if they had the casters casting buffs on the frontline while the frontline pointed/discussed in that scene, just to make it seem like they were doing prep work rather than standing around.

I guess I saw a lot of hate on that other site for this episode but, perhaps it’s because I’ve read the source material, nothing here really surprised me, all those scenes (the sisters, merchant, teleporting, king/prince, etc) happened in the novel, which is kind of why last week I said “just one more episode, and then another and another” because I don’t really expect the climax of this whole thing any time soon.

The monsters do look a bit goofy, well Ilumgand looked a bit intimidating in some stills, maybe it’s just the ED effecting us.