Punch Line #12 — Ali Macgraw Disease

June 25th, 2015

  

“My only regret… is that I have… terrible writing.”

Impressions:

Remember the cliffhanger last week? Bazillions of munitions incoming, people gasping, oh no, all is lost? They got out of it because they pulled out a magic shield, and boy, doesn’t that just say everything about this show. Like last week, the animation did continue on, thank god, but the rest of the writing was an utter mess. It really says something when you’ve got your protagonist finally doing something, and it has absolutely nothing to do with saving the world. Once they got Schmucky out of the room where the magic plot widget was, he was replaced by “random guy with a gun” being the only thing between their ultimate victory and the death of all life as we know it. I’m fairly sure that the heroic sacrifice that was neither heroic nor actually really any kind of a sacrifice, and brought on by writer-induced boneitis to begin with, exists solely so the writer can feel smug and say that it did matter. And, of course, the typical favorites, but this time, instead of just having a flashback, they had an astral journey into a flashback, before having an astral journey into a sunset, because sunsets in the middle of the night are the emotional and dramatic thing imaginable. Unless it was a sunrise. Twiiiiist!

As for the mystery of the cat, it was a cat. That was just hiding under the damnable bed or something. No doubt the mystery to be further revealed in the author’s special cliff’s notes. A nice final screw you to the audience to go out on.

Final Thoughts:

This was a frustrating mess. Frustrating, undeveloped characters who never left the house and had IQs in the low negatives. Frustrating plotline that was convoluted for no reason or purpose, had to spent a truly abhorrent amount of time explaining random arbitrary things that served no purpose, and incredibly satisfied about trying to layer flashback after flashback and twist after twist even when most had no bearing on events or worse, made absolutely no sense. Frustrating pacing because of said flashbacks and said characters spending the entire time sitting around and thinking, and when they stopped, it was almost always just to have a party celebrating what good friends they were.

It was nowhere near as intelligent as it considered itself, nowhere as quirky as it thought it was, and even that drained quickly out, and for all its piffling about, puffed out in an unsatisfactory fart of action that had basically been not seen since the very first episode, spent almost entirely fighting grunts. Yeah, the action was decently animated when it existed… in those three whole episodes, but the rest of this show is a mess. You can’t root for characters when they’re not even trying, and you can’t care about characters who don’t care themselves. Slapping on some flashbacks and twists only for the sake of a twist is a band-aid at best, and this tried to use them as the food that would sustain it. Don’t eat band-aids. Thank god this season is over.

Posted in Punch Line | 6 Comments »

6 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • Abyss says:

    Actually, remember when they said it was like a game? A game of it is coming on PsVita and PS4 so the show was a giant advertising, that’s the Punchline goodnight folks.

  • algorithm says:

    Uturn reincarnates as the cat. Eh.

  • Mesousa2877 says:

    Who cares? Yuta’s a cute girl now. Forever.

  • Anime Fan says:

    Loving the anime picture gallery as always. Well done man.

  • Steiner768 says:

    Fate/Unlimited and GiTS were much better than this

  • Susan says:

    What name of song at ending?