天下制覇

20 minutes of one thing, 2 minutes of reducing it all to nothing. Goodie.

Impressions:

Any good feelings this ending started to engender about being a closed ending were successfully wiped away by the end. Good work, Silver Link. I like melancholic endings too. At least far more than these damn resets. "This is sooooo important and moving. Wait, no. CHANGED OUR MINDS!" The episode was fairly nice until around the halfway point though. Aside from the opening annoyance, the peanut gallery was kept out of it, and Yuuko/Doofus’s date was romantic enough. Not really sure why it was suddenly the middle of winter, but okay, we can roll with that. Then Yuuko had to stop everything and explain that she was disappearing to his face, list out that she was happy, recap the events of the last eleven episodes, etc. Way to throw a damp towel on the whole scene.

After that was a whole lot of melodrama, remninding us all that she’s a ghost, and one ginormous zoom out of a roof, and waiting for her to die/disappear. Again, I did like her ‘death’ scene… Nice evocative with the music and the direction. Perhaps if it hadn’t been wiped away not two minutes later with her just going "Oh, I’m back. And I’m really horny now. Hilarious taking responsibility joke," I wouldn’t now be annoyed by it instead. Even an open ending would’ve been better.

Final thoughts below.

Final Thoughts:

The characters were the biggest weakness by far in this one, although the pacing wasn’t doing it any favors either. With such a small cast, you’d think they’d be given the chance to be fleshed out and develop, but no. They all remained more or less the same from start to finish with barely even any interest in the events going on around them. Silver Link did often do a good job with the direction and artistic presentation, as is usual for them. Particularly at the start before I knew the characters and story would be going nowhere. I wasn’t a fan of all their gimmicks, but at least they were creative in their presentation. Regardless, it wasn’t enough to liven up the dull and static cast. Doofus’s job was to stand there staring at things. Noisy’s job was to introduce the plot of the week. Angry’s job was to provide exposition on the plot of the week, and Yuuko was there to either provide some T&A or be the damsel in distress. Even when things happened, my main question tended to be "Yes? So?" given how little impacted most of the cast was. The shadow probably didn’t help things too much either since it was introduced very early and then teased for half the season without getting to it before pulling all manner of random drama-inducing powers out of nowhere.

There was ostensibly the mystery of Yuuko’s death, but nobody seemed all that interested in finding out, and when they finally did, they proceeded to do absolutely nothing with it. Wow. Nothing gives weight to an entire episode of flashback like proceeding to ignore it. It’d probably have had more meaning if he HADN’T known a damn thing about it and decided to be emotional at the shadow anyway. Plus, the big conflict of the season between Yuuko and her shadow was resolved by Doofus just going "I know your pain." Bang, howdy, all done. Thrilling. Talk about convenient. I guess at least I can remember it though, which is more than I can say for episodes 3-8 or so.

I’ve watched worse, but this ended up being pretty disappointing and I’m sticking to the characters as the reasons why. They just bore me and the only thing of note they do is have feelings at things. Yuuko, the shadow, whatever. It seems to always solve problems. Even Yuuko’s schtick got old by about three episodes in and never changed. So another meh, says I. Meh!