天下制覇

They float on my shoulder and catch on fire.

Impressions:

Same as always. If Yoshi and Athena's relationship had actually been developed in any way, this ending might have had a little more oomph behind it, or maybe if they had done something other than vaguely handwave over losing his logic card, they could've gotten an emotional rise out of that, but alas. It limps across the finish line on the cost of winning being having to go search for something for ill-justified reasons, but it was hanging around on a hill all along. It's also immensely unsatisfying that Olga ends up with little more than a slap on the wrist for it all, although that was fully expected since this show has really never shown any teeth.

At least it didn't abuse the friendship power crap too badly in the end of the big fight, although like the romance angle and any number of other things in this show, it begs the question of why they included it at all if they were then going to more or less sidestep it. It kept the animation up as much as it could too, although that's really only relative to this show's other episodes as it was still well worse than par. Still, I expect far worse and far more unsatisfying from certain other shows ending this weekend. Lord knows how I'd have looked at this show this season had there not been so many other dragging down the bottom line.

Final Thoughts:

The rallying cry for this show for its entire run was "I can see what they were going for, but the execution simply wasn't there." That's still vastly preferable to the usual anime structure of "pad out the time until we run out of episodes" or "overexplain everything to absolute death," so it could be frustrating when it left gigantic holes in character motivations or the plot, or failed to actually develop the ones that it then focused on in the climax. And it certainly did have a couple episodes of padding and info dumping nonsense as well, so it's not completely sinless, but most of its problems came more from just making incomprehensible leaps in the writing in the name of moving things to whatever the predetermined spot would be.

Again though, I'm inclined to be a little more charitable since it did the macro structure correctly so didn't suffer nearly as much from the pacing problems that absolutely plague anime in recent years. If both the main protagonist and main antagonist had been a bit more involved in resolving everyone's issues and developing themselves along the way, the ending would have worked much better. Then again, there's also the matter of the CGI action being far too weird looking and yet there was also somehow far too little of it.

There's the possibility of a genuinely decent show in its skeleton, but it mostly badly needed another editing pass on the writing. Preferable to simply needing half the episodes cut out because they contributed nothing, but there are no points for that.