天下制覇

  

No fooling, guys! The princess is dead for real! For the third time!

Impressions:

Oh no! His super mech has the power of multiple previous super mechs! And there’s no body of water anywhere in sight! How will Eggboy overcome his deadliest challenge yet!? We only have five minutes to sit around and chat at the start before things get serious for real. Oh right, he’s just that good. He’ll just talk his way through shooting a couple things he brought along and win. What a satisfying ultimate victory for Eggboy.

And of course, then there’s the ending. If they actually had balls to dispose of the cardboard box and girl-Jesus, that’d probably improve things, but I’m unconvinced. Especially after pulling “The princess is totally dead” card multiple times already. Who knew that returning to the same schtick over and over again would devalue it and lead to skepticism when they tried to do it again? As disposable as they were, serving little purpose except to defeat the monster of the week and be a battery/symbol of uber love respectively, it’s not like the rest of the cast is any better. Hell, some of them exist for no other reason than to rub themselves against those characters and say how great they are.    

  

‘Final’ Thoughts:

This isn’t really an ending, but whatever. It may be the last time I seriously look at it. The biggest problem that the show needs to solve is in the writing. Production was mostly solid, although was much stronger during its “Robot Master of the Week” phase than its “We Need To Pad The Hell Out of This To Get to the Halfway Point” phase, and could certainly stand to not put insert songs on bloody everything. Contrast, people. If you treat every single piddly little fight as special, what do you do when you get to one that actually needs extra oomph?

*ahem* The writing. While there’s plenty of bizarre plot developments pulled straight from the ass, or supposed acts of genius that stretch credulity past the breaking point, the characters are the far bigger problem. They’re pretty much all ridiculous archetypes skewed to the extreme. Inaho is a cardboard box that can do anything and everything while everyone else is hopelessly incompetent. Whose His Face just sits around having PTSD episodes. The princess is the greatest more benevolent being on the face of the planet. Almost the entire rest of the cast exists just to extoll these traits on these three characters and are hardly worth mentioning. They’re all static through the whole thing which even as explosions happen, makes it feel like the whole thing is going absolutely nowhere by returning to the same schtick again and again and against with the main ‘developments’ in the show (especially toward the end) are simply given as lectures from the similarly unexciting and extremely disposable antagonists. Slaine may be the only one who has a personal stake, but he’s only barely more emotive than Inaho and so far, has had little purpose outside of one or two episodes except to be a pair of ears for the antagonists to talk at. And fulfill the role of moaning naked boy, I guess.

I don’t see it solving those issues going forward. Maybe they’ll surprise me. Maybe Inaho and the princess really are dead and some other less abhorrent characters will step up. I personally doubt it though, and even if they did, they’ll probably end up going through the exact same motions.