天下制覇

 

I find it difficult to believe that humans produced this script.

Impressions:

This was fascinating in what may have been the worst possible ways. To review the plot of this episode, college girls were being kidnapped. What they had in common was that they all slept with an old rich guy who was so tortured by having a safe full of old porn that he was whispering the combination in his sleep. The kidnappers somehow knew not only that, but that one of them was so OCD that she was compelled to not only write down but memorize every string of letters and numbers she heard, even after being taking a ride on the old man salami express. However, they weren’t sure which girl, so they just started kidnapping all of them (there were supposedly like ten) and nobody, not even their friends, gave a rat’s ass. And I haven’t even gotten into the corny super powers that require them to do things like blow bubbles to use their super strength either, or how every use of powers covers the world in an LSD technicolor nightmare. I’m sure enough jokes were already made at Darker Than Black’s expense for the bubble chewing type things anyway.

To say this was poorly written does poor writing an injustice. It’s not even like they wrote themselves into a corner either. There’s just an info dump out of nowhere explaining everything and that is what they came up with. And it’d only get even more confusing if I started using most of the characters’ names, which are just random English words like Nice, Ratio, and Birthday. But I guess when you have a super powered task squad out fighting crime, it’s probably supposed to be more about the action anyway. Too bad there’s not much of it. Like usual, Kishi does a competent job animating it when it’s there, but it’s soon gone and everything else falls into the realm of “meh” or worse, especially the abysmal introductory sequence that was basically just 30 seconds of pontification over a child’s fingerpainting for a very weak punchline. Thankfully, they shook the camera during it too or I would have been bored.

Besides the writing, I feel like all I can muster up is the ever-lazy critical statement of “could be worse.” The characters are all shallow cariacatures that veer towards the noisy end of the spectrum, but at least nobody narrated their life story and they showed some degree of competence. Production was mostly phoned in with lots and lots of just dumping out the utterly inane plot, but they did have at least a few moments of decent action at the climax before what was a complete non-sequitur into what’s presumably the show’s main plot. Certainly does noteworthy things with its time, but still manages to be eminently forgettable. I feel like I’ve said all this before about other Keiji supernatural action shows too, Angel Beats, Persona 4, Devil Survivor 2, etc, and that’s why I don’t feel particularly enthusiastic here, even with the hope and promise that the writing may only somehow get worse.

Next Episode:

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