天下制覇

"Thanks to the power of my friends who I don't need!"

Winter preview will be up either this weekend or early next week, depending on how much holiday/family stuff exhausts me (first broadcast doesn't begin until the 5th anyway). Beta/Test version of BB2 for finding new errors (and there have been some weird implementations breaking stuff once again) will be up whichever day the preview's not.

Impressions:

Unfortunately, no real surprises here. A couple people whipped new transformations out of their asses to handily win their fights, the protagonist with the power of thinking of his friends (so he then proceeded to force them to let him fight completely on his own, because screw them), and everyone walks away, happily ever after. The city full of people that were crushed and eaten by demonic walls of flesh don't count. Getting impaled used to mean something. Okay, that's a lie. It probably never meant anything in Japanese media, or at most, meant they had to disappear for an episode or two before coming back in an opera mask.

Anyway, while at least it was sometimes animated, Cavalry, there was never any tension or direction to the fights. The closest it came was a stream of characters or CGI fleshmouths announcing character feelings and motivations over the sentai-ripoffs hopping around. The action wasn't serving the plot, it was something to sometimes watch in between or during all the bad exposition being spewed out, and I'm not sure a protagonist character even so much as took a punch the entire time. Oh, and it was ended with our protagonist suddenly remembering he had a super special attack, which instantly one-shot the antagonist. Japan, we really need to talk about this.

Final Thoughts:

I might give it the dubious award for "Best trashy magical fighting teenagers light novel adaptation" of the season, but that isn't to say it's without a host of problems that keep it from pulling itself out of the muck. The budget exists and keeps up for the whole way through, the action scenes aren't a series of gruntings, the story arcs are generally wrapped up in 2-3 episodes so it doesn't suffer from the glacial pacing that most do, and it doesn't get mired down in a goddamned season long school sponsored tournament arc. On the surface, it seems like they've addressed most of the major sins that plague these kinds of shows.

Alas and alack. Each arc can be slotted into an identical formula of one episode of mostly shenanigans, someone losing their confidence and giving the protagonist an open invitation to Bonesville, then an episode where they explain things, gain their confidence back, and overcome whatever threat has (quite often literally) burst from the ground with little more than a cursory struggle before fading back into the background forever. Every single member of the cast is superfluous. Granted, some more than others, Blondie, but absolutely nothing would have changed if any single one of them spent the entire run buried under a ton of cement or all the arcs were shuffled randomly. The antagonist situation is where it probably suffers the worst, as they, the supposedly crappiest team around, mind you, were never really put under pressure and handled everything from body snatchers to giant dragons, quickly and easily. There were also tone problems from start to end, with it trying to both be full of 'wacky' fanservice and cloying females rubbing their junk on the only male junk in the area, and deadly serious with child dismemberment, rape, murder, etc. It can work, with a deft hand, but here, it was just like two completely different shows got mashed together.

I'm going to stick with the complete lack of highs being what did this in to me. There's nothing substantial or strong enough to point to here as a reason I could see anybody really getting invested in it. Not characters, not action, not plot. There's certainly far, far worse out there, and it'll pass the time if you're bored, but is destined to be forgotten alongside the likes of Unbreakable Machine Doll and Dragonar in the annals of anime history.