天下制覇

You’d think that would have improved the show at this point, but it does not.

Impressions:

Oh boy, another show with the "I blocked tentacles by standing five feet away from where they were stabbing." At least they didn’t really play it up for too much drama as the Evil of Evilness then immediately just stabbed and ate Sen away. Great work, Hanzou. Way to use those super powers. Then maybe to make things worse, they practically repeated the scene two more times. One of those involved a push though and the other just regular stabbings though, so I guess they get a pass. On the upside, the animation flirted with competent more times this episode than it probably has all the rest of the season. "A whole two times?"  you ask? The animation budget was exhausted again as of about four minutes into the episode anyway and doesn’t return until three minutes from the end.

They don’t get a pass for hauling out the sad music at the middle though. Or for Jubei and Munakata suddenly gaining the power of flight and just cruising around. Or for the plotting. They fly into the core, immediately get caught, but then everybody else who was caught is actually free and with the power of liking each other, "their hearts become one," and Muneakira was the Samurai Bride all along. I wish. What actually happens is Jubei grows fox ears and her hair turns white, so the evils stand in their way, but with a wave of cherry petals, they disappear, and then they use their newly discovered jetpack to charge straight through the core. Because that’s what goes with the dress and veil, a magical wooden jetpack. The bloody end.

That leaves just two great mysteries in the ending. Why the hell did they show the evil core through the entire credit sequence, and why did someone draw a giant erect dick? I guess we’ll have to wait until the DVD release retcons it again before finding out.

Final Thoughts:

What an utter waste of everything, not even servicable for T&A this season. I think the most telling thing though is that I can’t think of a single meaningful thing that happened this season. They introduced a bunch of antagonist… only to have them piss around 20 feet away from the protagonists for the entire show. They introduced the monkey and whose-her-face on the bike… just to have them immediately disappear again. They doled out the super powers to the remainining XXs on the cast… only for them to never use them. And then they fought "evil," ’cause it like, destroys things and stuff. Caust it’s evil.

So I don’t want the point is. Not to look at some T&A, not the action, not the plot. The first season at least had traces of each of those along with a little style early on. Sure, it utterly flubbed most toward the end, but there’s something endearing about a show at least trying, and this was anything but. Despite what the first episode may lead anybody to believe, nothing of weight ever happens, the new characters hardly even both to interact with their ‘rivals,’ after the opening episode, and they don’t even serve up any eye candy in either animation or breasts. You can at least be sensational, Arms. That grabs attention, good or bad. This quickly became little more than lukewarm mush without a trace of anything notable about it at all.