With swords and claws and teeth, the girls of Claymore hack their way through nasty foes and conspiracies alike.  The further Claymore goes along, the more firmly it settles into the shounen action camp, with the silver-eyed witches leveling up, the baddies getting badder, and lots and lots of fighting.  While the fifth volume is fun to watch, it's a little sad to see the interesting backstories and conspiracy theories give way to marathon battles.  The battles are cool, mind, but after a while they all start to run together and it is hard not to wonder when there will be a return of the plot.

Clare is bent on seeking revenge against the Awakened Being, Priscilla, who has joined with Isley, a powerful former Claymore raising an army of Awakened Beings in the north.  After learning that Raki, too, was spotted in the north, and with some gentle persuading from the Organization, Clare heads to the town of Pieta - complete with its own statue of Michaelangelo's sculpture of the same name - to join with a large group of Claymores who have been ordered to take down the horde of Awakened Beings.  It's up to Clare to stay alive long enough to battle through the Awakened Beings, find Raki, and carry out her revenge on Priscilla.  Can she do it?  Dun-dun-dun!

Maybe it's just me, but the battles in these episodes just seem like a long, drawn out aside, or some filler until we get to the good stuff.  Clare has so many reasons to want Priscilla dead, and plenty of reasons to want to keep Raki alive, that all the fights in between are starting to become a drag.  No proper hero should have a cakewalk leading to the main showdown, but there's a fine line between adversity and tedium.  The Awakened Beings are certainly providing plenty of adversity for the Claymores, but at the expense a wandering attention span.

While the battle rages on, the tedium is nicely broken up with several scene shifts.  After going missing for just about the entirety of volume 4, Raki turns up, unwittingly making Clare's position all the more tenuous.  Shifting the scene between Raki's new companions and the battle works really well for building tension.  The more Raki talks about Clare to his traveling buddies and the longer they travel together, the more painfully obvious it becomes that Raki has gotten himself into a nasty predicament.  There's hope yet for the final volume.  Now that all the pieces are in place, knocking over the last domino and seeing how they fall should be a lot of fun.

Volume 5 of Claymore is all about gearing up for the big showdown.  It gets a bit tedious in places, but at the same time, we get the sense that what's happening is an epic battle.  That's cool.  What will be even spiffier is the prize at the end of this battle.  The previous volumes have built up our expectations, and hopefully Claymore will deliver a cold dish of revenge in the final round.

Details: Runtime 100 minutes, contains episodes 19-22.  Extras include actor commentary, an interview with art settings director Nobuhito Sue, textless songs, and trailers.