天下制覇

  

Couldn’t you have just teleported everyone away again, Embryo?

Impressions:

Why are we having a sad goodbye for MetalArm McRapey? Why are we having a goodbye at all? She was barely winged in the side. Lest we forget, a character got shot, run over, and exploded, and survived without a scratch because a frying pan blocked the bullet. I’m also tremendously disappointed that Ange’s panties weren’t really good for much of anything. Didn’t even help them teleport. That was all the magic ring and singing. I have to question why Ange’s magical transformation didn’t include pants though.

Otherwise, pretty much the ending everyone expected, just perhaps with more angry singing and hyperspace. Embryo teleported them to his magical island in space for a little rape privacy, everyone started singing, which teleported them to her, Tusk got another face-full of Ange’s dragon, everyone blew up everything, Embryo died cause of… everything being blown up, I guess. Maybe having the ‘real him’ be vivisected and blown up at the same time, although hell if I know why he even bothered to fight Tusk in the first place, or why he forgot all of his powers during the fight. The last ‘mech bosses’ ended up being a bunch of magical mech clones Embryo whipped out of his ass. One for each protagonist, wouldn’t you know! And luckily, both Salia and Hilda had magical feelings transformations held in reserve to whip out next to Ange turning white. Symbolism.

And then, everyone lives happily ever after, for some really weird definitions of happy.

   

Final Thoughts:

It was strongest at the start when it was bloody, jarring, and Ange was still evolving as a character, but unfortunately, it got fairly static and ironically, kind of pedestrian a month or two in. Pedestrian in a Sunrise kind of way, but it still shyed away from furthering any of the early episode’s body count. I can’t think of too much that really distinguishes this on a high level from a lot of Sunrise’s other original action shows except perhaps a somewhat weaker budget than usual. In the proud tradition of things like Vavlrave, Sacred Seven, and probably half a dozen other things that I didn’t watch in the last five years, it mainly distinguished itself from other shows by (usually) barreling right on ahead instead of stretching everything out for months or entire seasons. Which isn’t to say that there wasn’t plenty of stretching here. The second half in particular had a lot of simply putzing around as Ange and crowd was passed from one character to another. Things always being in motion is good in and of itself too, but it would have helped a lot if the plot progression and character development especially had been better fleshed out. Ange in particular became a rather static (and bitchy) character after her initial arc, which is still preferable to Angsty McInsecure we see almost everywhere else, but her arc was more of a plateau, and some main characters, blithely cheery maid in particular, didn’t even have that.

Exacerbating that was the familiar problem this season of the antagonist situation. Embryo was so comically evil and overpowered that the rest of the characters were simply no threat at all compared to him (even discounting the damn frisbee enemies they kept fighting), he kept whipping new powers out of his ass that obviated the events of entire episodes, and was killed/resurrected so many times that it was obvious his death was going to be whenever the writers said it counted instead of making any kind of logical sense. It’s hard to have any kind of tension in the final episodes when he and Ange are sitting on the sidelines and we know that nothing going on matters.

It was at least a talking piece most weeks, often for how ridiculous things were. That’s more than I can say about a lot of shows. Still not really worth watching unless you really adore Sunrise-brand ‘writing’ unfold into the traditional slow motion trainwreck though, and even this isn’t as wrecky or as flashy as most of them.