天下制覇

Okay, now I’m mad.

Impressions:

So, apparently on of my guesses was right. Last week’s entire episode, from when Kakeru saw Yuka getting shot by Lis onward was all just a vision he had. Guess he’s a virgin again! No, I do not care that he immediately turned around and tried to stop Lis from getting her way by shoving a sword through his throat either. He deserves far far worse after that particular brand of godawful horribleness. Who the hell thought that was a good idea? That’s the kind of irritation that colors the entire rest of the episode with its stupidity. This episode successfully erased whatever tiny bit of lingering affection I may have had for the series.

Sadly, things only get worse from there, as we’re treated to an excess of exposition from Kukuri and Shiori about how what happened in the past relating to Abaraxis and his sister. It got so bad that Misuzu started drawing on the wall to keep notes. At this point, only the bile rapidly filling my gullet was keeping me going to the bitter bitter end.  I have no idea how they were able to take on Lis so easily this week, nor why they thought now was a good time to start busting out secret magic superswords from nowhere. Make no mistake about it, Lis stripping Yuka half naked was the most interesting thing about this episode. I don’t even want to talk about the HAPPY HAPPY group hug as the world was reborn either. In a way, that’s kind of a microcosm of everything that’s been wrong with the last few episodes… outside of an episode entirely spent on a bad vision at any rate.

Final thoughts at the bottom.

Final Thoughts:

11eyes was at absolute best, an aggressively mediocre show, and for the other 95% of the time rather poor. It showed some promise at the start with an interesting premise and characters apparently already relatively set in an unusual relationship (for anime at least), but from there, everything regressed. The antagonists were punching bags for the first 80% of the show, the characters all devolved into simple one dimensional cariacatures that could just spout their catchphrase, the last half was plagued by the story grinding to a halt so characters could explain everything and the most interesting development was when one of the good guys went crazy, and even that was only notable for how overplayed it was.

Production was also mediocre at best as well, but nothing really worth mentioning either positively or adversely except for the truly horrendous direction. Constantly cutting away from the dynamic scenes in favor of talking heads is bad enough, but this show also abused cut-ins, fanservice, and bad CG visual effects like its director was a 12 year old kid with a fresh copy of Windows Moviemaker. Yes, Windows MovieMaker.

Bleh. Says I. Perhaps if they hadn’t totally erased the most interesting episode of the entire run as a dream sequence, maybe I would be slightly more forgiving. But I might as well wish for a pony and a Corvette for Christmas too, because I’m not getting any of them.