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Do these people think anything through at all?

I’m slow this morning because this is the last week I get to sleep in for a while. Next season preview will be up in the afternoon.

Impressions:

Wait a minute here. If all they needed to do was say a few words to magically beat Whose-His-Face, why didn’t he do that back when it was first revealed? That would have been much more effective than pulling your sword out of him and then glaring. The entire “cut off arm” plan was seemingly only to get close to him. Cutting off the arm and waving the bracelet around seems like it’d call a lot more attention to it, than, say, just jumping in his vague direction. This whole bounty system also seems excessively… unbalanced? Didn’t they used to have to at least cut them up before? Of course, there’s also both the shocking development of Bahamut immediately killing Beelzebutt and Lavatinet’s plan just being “I want everything to die, cause death is dark, guys”, but I think that pales in comparison to the pissing about in the middle over saving Amira after not two episodes ago having pretty much the exact same speech, only in the opposite direction. Next time, let’s skip both.

At least the budget was back after the last few weeks of extremely unpleasant and barely animated exposition. The whole episode was kind of a foregone conclusion nonetheless with very few surprises, and most unpleasant. It went through all the stuff you’d expect, no matter how little it fit, romance and sudden depth of caring for each other especially. I don’t think Favarro and Amira even interacted at all for the last month, let alone had a meaningful one. I’m also about 90% certain that the only reason they didn’t save her and wrap everything up with a nice little bow is because it was more successful (at least at the start) than they were expecting and wanted to angle for a sequel. Certainly not serving the story or characters, at any rate.

Final Thoughts:

This started very strongly, a fun adventure with amusing protagonists doing fun adventure things; fighting on giant rolling wheels, snappyish dialogue and back and forth, riding horses on rooftops, beating each other or monsters not because they had power but because they were clever. They were also generally motivated in their quests instead of morosely griping their way through life, Zombie Girl’s “I’m bored, so I’m coming with you to be the plot device whenever we need some magic” notwithstanding. It had the budget for that too.

However, the cracks in the writing, especially with Amira (doubly so with the magical super ethical horse, lest we forget that was a thing that this show did), appeared pretty quickly, but the weight placed on the writing grew and grew until it overwhelmed the entire thing in a sodden mess of multiple episodes straight of the characters teleporting from one place to the next just to listen to a speech. It’s not even like it was strong to begin with, what with every other villain of the week declaring that they were responsible for killing fathers, or revealing that they were the true mastermind. There were also all the characters like Jeanne and Cerberus who ate up a whole lot of screen time, but did very little to absolutely nothing. Plus we had Bahamut both needing the keys to break free, but also not. The takeaway here is that the writing was a bit of a boring slog. Its twists were dumb and changed nothing, and they felt a misguided need to ramp up everything toward the end which resulted in a mountain of honestly totally unnecessary exposition.

It started as a much better show than it ended. That last month of exposition was so much lead in its shoes. The writing certainly wasn’t stellar to start with, besides some nice interaction between them, even if characterization was inconsistent as hell, but when it got in the way, it was like a hippo squatting in the road. Fun for a while, but it was nowhere near what the show could have been or advertised itself as in the opening episodes.