天下制覇

Otherwise, he would’ve just looked normal when giving his inane speech.

FYI, KyoAni put up the first 5 minutes of the first episode for their show. It was about as boring as I had heard, but I’ll reserve doing a real post until there’s something a little more substantive. There was also a new commercial for Hidamari Sketch at the end of this episode.

Impressions:

Well, it was about as ridiculous as expected. Evil Glasses Girl didn’t get away with it, Yuuki and Chisato had a chocolate kiss at the end (which is not a euphemism for a Cleveland Steamer or anything), and he delivered a stirring speech after barging in, looking like a hobo and ranting on stage. All it was missing was an empty chair for him to talk to. This was also after running around town answering payphones. I like how one of the very first ones was behind barbed wire just to get him all torn up. Then the rest were just like… in the middle of the street. Despite his busy schedule, he managed to slam into girls anyway. I have no idea who those were even supposed to be, if anybody. They seemed entirely too cognizent of affairs to be your standard NPCs and too unique-ish to just be random throwaway characters too. Plus they got the endcard for some reason. Probably from some related game. *shrug*

And… uh… it’s over. Again. All of the actual character stuff was pretty much wrapped up last week. All the conspiracy stuff remained dumb to the very end and Chisato was just sitting in a box of packing peanuts. I’m not entirely certain why she had to be stripped down to her skivvies or what was keeping her in there besides the hope that she wouldn’t wake up. The overly dramatic music when she was telling him off about thinking more about himself and others instead of her was also a bit ridiculous. The vibraslap during the dramatic moment was not helping matters either. Vibraslaps never help.

Final Thoughts:

It started out a lot stronger than it finished. The election stuff was never great since it was always just some made-up dump of information that was then handwaved over before it moved onto the next machination, and the entire conspiracy plot was laughable. Thankfully, it was bad enough so that I actually was laughing at it towards the end instead of just groaning painfully. Some of the characters suffered from this as well. Almost all of Satsuki’s stuff in particular was just kind of spat out and resolved by dint of simply having been spat out without anybody actually doing anything.

But contrary to all the big stuff it screwed up, the show did very well with the smaller things. Yuuki won’t win any awards, except perhaps for a propensity for knocking girls over in wide open spaces, but most of the rest of the characters were fairly well-developed and had good chemistry together, especially the Yuuki, Chisato, Mifuyu threesome. Chisato did push right up against the line for overly melodramatic with those final bits, but for the first two thirds of the show, her small interactions with Yuuki, teasing, being teased, and supporting each other, did a great job showing how close they were. They just probably needed to introduce the angle about her brother earlier and a little more smoothly to build up to her emotional breakdown, not to mention have a better impetus to change than basically nothing.

It’s better than average, but the overblown conspiracy stuff and melodrama towards the end could’ve been handled so much better.. or even just cut out entirely. It’s definitely worth a watch if you like these kinds of romantic comedies, but isn’t particularly memorable or notable otherwise. It executes a lot of the small things well, just boffs the larger arcs, be they about the election or character ‘development.’ Such is life.