天下制覇

  

It beats the power of emotions.

Impressions:

Well, a much better ending than I expected, but I expected them to defeat Whose-His-Evilface with feelings after the “I’m powered by the concept of human suffering” bit, so even bringing Red back to life to go another round in the pits with nothing at stake, and Blindy suddenly becoming See-y, defeating Giganto with lasers, explosives, and barreling through his eye still counts as better than expected. It also helps that there was more action animation in the last half than there was in the entire rest of the show. If the whole thing had been like this, it’d at least have the excuse of eyecandy, flash, and getting the heart pumping to fall back on.

To the shock of I hope nobody, the two characters who look like the original Yatterman pair who also have nearly identical names step into the role of the true Yatterman while while I presume was a song from the original Yatterman played, which was especially funny when they were straight up murdering a bunch of cyborgs. I can’t help that their (lack of) character arcs would have worked much better if they had been unwilling antagonists against Team Always Naked In Front of a Little Girl For Some Reason. And not woefully incompetent from the start. And not blind.

Final Thoughts:

This was a show that never really had a great idea what it wanted to be or what it was going to do with its characters. The first couple episodes were drenched in sentimentality like a ketchup glaze, but then it dropped much of that after about a month to mostly be an uninspired gag reference comedy with some sappiness tacked onto the end and eventually ended in an inspirational gigantic firefight. It probably would have been well served to excise at least one of those, not to mention focus a bit better on the characters and provide them with actual arcs instead of being a static “This blonde little girl is so brave and awesome” from start to finish. Gatchan especially mostly just moped about insecurely, forgetting whatever inconsequential lesson he had learned the previous week.

It’s not the worst thing out there, certainly not for this season, but probably would have served better with about half the episodes. The comedy wasn’t there, most of the action confined to the last half of the final episode, the sentimentality delivered like a sledgehammer blow, and the character journey was more of a pitstop. It had a strong ending episode, but that doesn’t make up for the 9-10 that they used to just fill the time.