天下制覇

   

A magic goddamned ghost horse.

Not sure what the deal is with the site today. Communication issues with its backend database for some reason. I informed my host and got a form letter back about optimizing WordPress. Thanks, team.

Impressions:

So… Mendoza played Tetris for a while so he could summon the huge ultra monster in order to eat it and become super powerful/Sephiroth and take Leon to The Mendoza Dimension. Could we maybe skip a few steps next time? And of course, since this is Japanese media, he proved his invincibility by standing there motionless and tanking every attack until it was time for the ultra special mega triangle rainbow super serious attack, thanks to the power from his friends, to cut him up for realsies, at which point, Ghost Dad on Magic Ghost Horse (on loan from Rage of Bahamut) rode up to save him. And did we really need mom’s ghost to come back just to tell Leon how proud she is of him? Lay it on thicker, guys. I think we can turn this yam into a candy apple.

Not to repeat myself, but I will. Up until the epilogue, pretty much the same as ever, but even more samier than the last couple episodes. Not that I expected any different at the last point, although with a sequel already confirmed, it would have been at least something notable if they had the balls to go for some kind of apocalyptic “You guys dicked everything up and now season two is going to be the actual monster doom death wasteland you kept pretending the end of this season was.” Instead, we just get the entirely expected painfully cliche asspull power up, and everyone strolls off into the sunset, satisfied with a job well done.

Final Thoughts:

Things were fairly okay at the start as an episodic monster hunting buddy adventure with at least one fun character and his angsty foil, both competent at their jobs with enough of a budget to keep the fights from being boring, but as the show went on, the antagonist situation reared its ugly head, or rather, the lack thereof as things never built up in a satisfactory manner. Mendoza was billed through the first half as the big bad, but no sooner was he confronted than he vanished in a puff of smoke only to come back at the very end, decrepit and bragging about having a really big monster, despite them having killed multiple things the sizes of houses already. The only thing the protagonists actually struggled with the entire time was just some random monster… which was a mobile gate, and even that they beat with only half of the protagonists showing up. They tried to kill off German to show how super high the stakes had gotten, but even he went down offscreen to a swarm of things he’d killed bazillions of and we only got told in a pissant little throwaway line about how awful it was. And then he turned up on a magic ghost horse anyway.

There’s a lot in general that really didn’t go anywhere. Much ado is made about the characters especially, but Leon’s growth arc is both excessively long and more of a rotation bringing him right back to exactly where he was before with his new family immediately forgotten, and Blondie, Female, and Old Female, for all their screen time, were completely vestigial to the entire affair. Similarly, they spent ages teasing around Mendoza in the second half just for the grand plan to be yet another monster of the week, dispatched in less time than it took to play Tetris summoning/freeing it, to say nothing of the utter lack of any personal connection to anything which they awkwardly tried to shoehorn in with the ghost of mom (again, totally forgotten for the last 12 episodes or so) showing up to tell everyone good job. Or Mendoza’s maid, who hung around for half the show only to be shown that her dastardly task was being his maid before turning into yet another monster of the week. It’s not limited to the characters either, lest we forget Leon’s magic demon ring that they made a big deal out of how cool it was and how he’d now be suffering the mother of all menstruation headaches every month before it was only ever brought up again when they needed a magical widget to do whatever the plot needed to (not) move forward.

If I wanted to be pithy, I’d say there’s too much sizzle and not enough steak. Unsatisfying is the word I’d pick to describe this. It had the pieces in place for a good adventure, including the rarest piece of all, a decent budget, and the second rarest, a fun character I didn’t want to strangle, but despite how much it kept saying it was doing things with them and ramping up to their greatest challenge yet, the characters did little more than effortlessly squash monsters of the week while the plot just built up to squashing a somewhat larger monster of the week. The closest it came was Leon losing his temper, but again, he just went to a farm for a while and then jumped right back into it, having learned… whatever lesson he was supposed to learn. To count to 10 after kissing the skeleton of his mom before losing his temper, I guess. If you skipped those 6 or so episodes, you probably wouldn’t have noticed a difference at all.