Taboo Tattoo #12 — Giant Monster Punchies
September 19th, 2016
Uwarerumono? What's that?
I'll leave another short/fanservicey post on Wednesday, but I'm out of town Thursday to Sunday night. I'll catch up on the weekend shows on Monday, and should I choose to do a season preview for fall (seriously considering skipping it, as well as doing a few brief summary mega-posts instead of full posts for everything), it'll be up Thursday or Friday of next week.
Impressions:
Well, I guess that's how we get to the last boss fight. Izzy and Whose-His-Face spar against the princess for half the episode, and then everyone (okay, only two of them), transforms into giant Utawarerumono monsters and has a lame ugly punchy sequence with the metaphorical power of friendship saving the day. Which was all according to Whose-Its master plan, apparently. That was a little easier to swallow than The Power of His Friends backing Seigi for his finishing punch and then chanting of USA. Okay, I'll admit that I rolled my eyes and chuckled a little bit, which is more of an emotion than anything Ange Vierge has elicted with its week in, week out POWER OF FRIENDSHIP nonsense, but I'm still not giving it any points for that. It's the only time this show has gone this brand of corny, and the last episode is as good a place for it as any.
And then they all fly off into the sunset, except for a weird post-credits sequence that was kind of a next episode preview but without explicitly saying another season would be coming, at least in-episode. Was it just an ad for the ongoing source then? A pitch for another season? Who knows. Aside from the Princess teleporting away to fight on another day, it was a decent enough ending. Didn't solve all the writing problems that plagued the show, and I would've MUCH preferred the giant monster and more personal/brutal/cyborg-arm-ripping parts be reversed to make the final fight less abstractly monstery, but that's a mountain I doubt a single episode would've been able to overcome anyway.
Final Thoughts:
As far as popcorn action shows go, this one did a fine job at it, and it was the only show I was watching this season where I didn't expect to be bored or hate the characters for being either boring morons or worthless sacks of crap, so those are high marks in its favor, even if it then killed off some of the ones growing on me. If it had a larger budget, it'd definitely have been able to maintain a high octane drive through the whole thing, but it does certainly harken back to some of JC Staff's heyday with action shows, such as it was. Which isn't to say that the action was bad at all. It was present in nearly every episode and while it could be overblown about characters blathering on, the actual exposition about powers and what gimmicks each character had were kept mercifully short and expressed visually instead of through rote explanation. It also had a delightfully cavalier attitude towards murdering everyone and everything.
The biggest problem keeping it from being a really great show is the writing. While it keeps up a good clip that lets it skate over a lot of issues, there's also just plain not a lot of thought put into it. At the start, it mostly manifested itself through inappropriate jokes that they kept trying to crowbar in. Towards the end, it was pretty much everything revolving around the princess, who was also serving as the main antagonist. But there were problems everywhere. Characters like the cat-girl were introduced, fleshed out, then all that jettisoned in a bloody murder-chomp and they essentially vanished from the show. Others, like the bug-guy, were just around for a long time before dying without any real purpose or reason. That one sidekick guy in the last battle got entire scenes and fights and I really have no idea why
Well, again, it's a popcorn action show. Enjoyable enough while it's here, a good cast of characters who use their angst and anger instead of wallowing in it, but overall, largely insubstantial, and not far enough off the rails with the writing to get to Guilty Crown or Cross Ange levels of amusing absurdity. I wouldn't mind seeing more of it, as that weird closing sequence seemed to indicate would be coming. And that's higher praise than I'm willing to give any other show this season.
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All the love I developed towards this series disappeared with this damn episode.
Finally a main character that learns the lesson just to return to the “I’ll save everyone, including you!” bullshit so the next time the girl he spared can kill another girlfriend or destroy the humanity. Sigh, this triggers me beyond words.