天下制覇

Man, am I glad that this season is all but over.

Impressions:

I’d compliment the action packed second half, but the copious number of flashbacks and almost three straight minutes of exposition from Kaho made it obvious where the budget came from. We also managed to hit just about every single bad cliche, from "That’s not Yumiko anymore" to "Revived bad guy immediately kills all other bad guys that summoned her." I don’t even want to talk about the power of friendship triumphing, but I know that somewhere, Totali is doing his little "Love Power wins again" happy dance. I particularly ‘enjoyed’ them getting sucked into the hole of doom, and then immediately climbing right out because of Soushirou.

To be honest though, for the most part, this was about as good of an ending as I think they could have cobbled together, which really isn’t meant as a compliment for the series as a whole. It was a better episode than the vast majority, so I’m happy for at least that much. They certainly could have droned on a lot more and have had Koyomi revive Yumiko with the memory of a hamburger or some other similar nonsense, which is what I was honestly expecting.  

Final Thoughts

I was never really that enamored with this show, and it never really developed into a particularly servicible comedy nor action show. It lacked the humor for the former and the budget for the latter. There was a brief arc where it had a plot, but aside from that and what was tossed in at the last minute, there was no real overall structure to the show and the characters none of the characters developed or grew in any meaningful way. They even teased us right out of the gates with the chronological tweaking and at least decent fights between JJ and crowd, but then that ended up being about as impressive as the show was ever going to get instead of a prelude for something bigger.

So it’s generic, unremarkable, and there isn’t a single thing about it that I think I’ll be able to remember in a month. At least it wasn’t offensively bad, and between educational puppet time and the random 26 minute episode, it at least set a new… uh… paradigm for puppet use in anime? I don’t know. I mostly just hope that my guess is right and Nomad was sinking its cash and time into Kampfer instead of this. At least there, even the most annoying whiny girls can shoot fireballs, and sometimes have penises as well. There’s no part of that that I don’t think would be an improvement over this.