天下制覇

  

I just assume at this point that every decent writer in Japan is drunk or dead.

Impressions:

Oho! So his master plan all along was to make everyone a mutant! And to do so, he… opened the box. And he couldn’t have done this without a distraction of flying the Parliament around because… because… Wait, I’m sure there must have been a reason. Like how there must have been a reason Rinka hesitated before regaining her powers. Cause… people attack you or something? Same as they were doing when she had no powers. But Kyoutarou! He’d have… done something, I guess? And the Prof’s power of illusion is so great, that it even works on grenades. That’s right. He fooled a live grenade into thinking it was encased in ice, thereby disarming it. I’m trying to understand here, guys.

And then Professor Pelican X came and saved the day, except that the villains were actually offed by “Some Guy” and “Some Woman” after the Professor somehow survived another grenade literally under his feet, so really, the protagonists didn’t even need to show up at all and everything would have worked out the exact same. Who the hell even were those people? Random Japanese gods, I guess? Christ, show. Of all the terribly written things this season, you’re sure making an incredible case for yourself in the eleventh hour.

Final Thoughts:

Like many a thing this season, I’d lay the blame for this turning out as lackluster as it did on the characters and plodding narrative, although the production certainly had its hand in it as well. After the medias res opening episode, it needed to go back and build up to that, but instead spent too much time simply pissing around. Most excruciating was the training arc for no reason that taught her nothing, but there were so many characters introduced that served little to no purpose in the context of the overall narrative but to eat up time, on both the protagonist and the antagonist sides. The supposed heart of the whole thing seems to be anchored on Rinka and Kyoutarou, but I’ve seen barristas having more significant interactions with their customers than these two had. Perhaps it could have worked if they spent more time actually developing those two and less time on characters who were summarily disposed of in seconds or spent the entire climax on the sideline a few miles away, but no point wishing, especially with how godawful the writing got at the end.

It couldn’t cover it up under the fog of eyecandy or “stuff happening” either, especially in the later going when everything ground to a halt under the weight of the aforementioned training arc in addition to a truly absurd number of repetitive or entirely unneeded flashbacks that added nothing but run time. The budget was clearly blown on the first episode and most of the production after that was very poorly animated, not to mention rare. I struggle to think of any part of the story, including the end of various arcs, that felt like a climax or that the protagonists accomplished anything. Meanwhile the antagonists were apparently content to just hang around until Ze Designated Plot Moving Time while the good guys were off doing training montages. To cap it all off, the antagonists weren’t even defeated by the protagonists, but by two random people pulled out of nowhere, no doubt for a sequel/continuation that exists only in the source/fevered dreams of a mad man. Christ. You couldn’t even supply bloody closure to this affair.

Feh.