天下制覇

AC/DC wouldn’t approve.

Impressions:

And this season comes to a rather expected end. I guess the episode was slightly better than most of this season, but it was still far from what the show’s capable of. Some of the "this is the last episode! Check out all these cameos!" were irritating as well and not a single part of the whole "Find Henriette" plotline was either funny or touched the slightest bit of emotion. Cordelia’s crazy song at the start was probably the highlight of the episode and it was all downhill from there into the usual standard for this season, some kind of unfortunate fusion between the "ha ha, this is sooooo random" shows that air on Adult Swim at 2am and little girls.

Last mission is to get Henriette back… who wants to come back, yada yada, winning some stupid ball makes them think she’ll come back, after some horrible dancing that makes me long for Symphogear’s CG ‘enhanced’ nonsense and they were lesbians she was part of the contest all along. I’m probably making it sound better than it was. I’m having a hard time they thought this was a finale, especially after last season ended with an all-out brawl on a floating island.

Final thoughts at the bottom.

Final Thoughts:

This season was a huge letdown compared to the first. Mainly what it lacked was direction and delivery. The first season certainly did have its share of rather poor episodes, lest we forget the angst episode or the episode with the two random women thieves among a few others. The show is at its best when it applies an actual structure and lets the jokes and humor happen as part of what’s going on. Unfortunately, what JC Staff seemed to have taken away from the first season is that "random = good" and utterly abandoned structure in all but a couple episodes. Nothing ruins a joke more than jamming it into someone’s face… repeatedly. This also wasn’t helped by the endless parade of side characters popping up to steal focus, or the main characters crossing the line from endearingly stupid to irritatingly chirpy with the force of an elephant being splattered against the pavement. The G4 robot may be the worst goddamned idea for a side character since Jar Jar, but not matter how much I tried to hate at it, the damn thing wouldn’t go away.

There were still a couple good episodes where A naturally flowed to B naturally flowed to C naturally flowed to D with the humor happening along the way instead of being generated by a roll on the Random Encounter Table. There weren’t enough though and none of them came towards the end of the season, so I’m more than a little annoyed at the show by this point. Hopefully if the franchise continues, they’ll pull things back and focus inward on the core characters with actual (conveniently 20 minute long) story lines. Structure and formula is not a bad thing. They exist for a reason and it’d be nice if JC Staff could remember that so I could go back to remembering this series fondly.