Phantom World #13 — My Power is Whatever Power I Want

March 30th, 2016

 

At least it's over.

Impressions:

No surprises here. Mince around for half the episode, surfing the internet and feeling sorry for themselves, then, once they finally get around to showing up to the fight, 30 seconds of actual fighting, pull some new power straight out of the large intenstine and boom, Bob's your uncle. Battle won, the supposed ultimate power taken last week used to do approximately nothing, give or take nothing, and non-drama drama sort of resolved, I guess? At least that's more than half the episodes of this show did, but no points are given for half-assing the finale after quarter-assing pretty much everything else. This arc, if you can even call it that, could've (and should've) been a single episode and the stuff with his mother is awkwardly tacked on like a tumor growing off the bigger tumor that is the story in general.

Final Thoughts:

Not much to say that I haven't already said over and over again for this show. It was obviously hugely unambitious in scope from the start, but it still could've been a solid show if it had done anything with the characters or the episodic stories. It most certainly did not. The characters quickly became set dressing, most of the challenges in the episodes were overcome by either either bothering to show up or simply tripping over the solution at the 19 minute mark, and even the challenges typically took the form of some single joke or gimmick done to death. It could've also wowed with the action or animation like it sort of did in the first couple episodes, but there was a pretty fast shift away from that too. Not that it was ever even as low as average, and a show like Luck and Logic would've been vastly improved by having this kind of production strength, but it was always sandwiched between boredom and nonsense, or boring nonsense.

It may not be offensively bad in any major way; avoiding the pitfalls of excessive melodramatic angst, godawful pacing, or abhorrent characters, but it doesn't fill those voids with anything either. Well, perhaps the writing… and maybe I find the lack of ambition and unwillingness to give any character at all any kind of even slight development for fear of putting off anybody emblematic of Japanese media's writing problem's these days, but I think I'm more fatigued by at it at this point than offended by their seeming devotion to white noise. I can't remember if I was getting at anything in particular, so let's just call it an unsalted saltine with a bit more colorful packaging than usual.

Posted in Phantom World | 4 Comments »

4 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • algorithm says:

    My pokemons have reached their final forms, you stand no chance.

  • DoucheBoss says:

    Would aroduc have liked the light novel volume 1 ending where enigma destroys most of the world by summoning phantoms and people basically live in a post apocalyptic society, while haru is all dark and edgy because he has no powers anymore but mysterious anime woman shows up and gives him a magical sword to beat phantoms with?

  • arknoir says:

    You’d have to ask the MC a few questions after this finale like….

    a) How did he catch Carmen Sandiego? http://tenka.seiha.org/images2016/pw12/81_th.jpg

    b) Which kiss did he prefer? Was it with himself(shantae) or his mom?

    c) How would he feel after living alone for so long and know his tart of a mom was shacked up with another bloke?