This episode is mostly just a pastiche of Super Mario and classic children’s anime.  You probably already know about how much enjoyment you’ll get from it.

Steven: Steven bomb! I got you.

Garnet: You got me.

Steven: And now you’re blind!

Garnet: Tiny hands. My only weakness.

Garnet just can’t say no Steven and it is adorable.

Steven: What did you do today?

Garnet: Tell me what you think I did.

Thus we enter Steven’s idea of what Garnet does on her many “solo” missions, and it looks like a cross between a video game and a cheap anime (possibly Dragon Ball?).  Personally, I think what it really needed was its own theme song, but I guess I can’t have all the Steven Universe songs I want.

Garnet: [Steven]’s not ready to learn that I have secret animal friends.

Her “secret animal friends” have the same voice actresses as Amethyst and Pearl, but with their personalities swapped (Amethyst voices the stoic one, Pearl the silly one).  All of the characters from “Garnet’s Universe” are voiced by actors with significant roles in the main series (Ronaldo and Lars show up, too), although I don’t think it’s intended as any sort of commentary on their characters.  It feels more like somebody wanted to animate an homage to their nerdy childhood and brought in whoever was around that day.

The plot of this episode is all but irrelevant – the aesthetic is the entire point, and largely the entire joke.  I’m not a huge fan of reference humor in general, and since I think I’m missing a lot of the references in this episode anyway, I found it cute but mostly forgettable.

Somehow, I just find it funny that that’s clearly Korean text, not Japanese.

So Garnet is tricked into fighting the guardian of the magical gem artifact while the actual villain steals it.

Ringo: You dummies fell for it! Now the Sacred Gem of Ultimate Power is mine!

At least I get the Sailor Moon reference!

Garnet: Ringo! You must be defeated!

Ringo: Ahem. The name’s Ultimate Ringo.

Steven: …and that’s what you did today!

Garnet: Yeah, that’s pretty much what happened.

Steven: Really?

Garnet: No.

Basically the only relevance this has to the rest of the series is that it offers a small look at how Steven perceives Garnet.  He suspects that a) She loves him more than anything (but would never tell him so) and b) She’s hiding something big from him, but probably for benign reasons.  That could’ve been fit into a much smaller space, but at least they had fun animating it.

Until next time…