天下制覇

Wait, the queen wants to bone Jeanne now?

Impressions:

We limp relatively uneventfully to a non-ending. The evil dude turns giant and is immediately dispatched, then the rest of the first half is spent doing a quick runthrough wrapping up Phillip's crap and doing a review of how great this makes the legend of Jeanne… somehow. The second half is then a review of all the haremettes that the show spent most of the last two months pretending they didn't exist and assuring us that they got over all their stuff, you know, just, on their own, off screen, and are all perfectly fine and redevoted to their obsession with Monmon. That vision of the future that haunted them? Eh, whatever. Here's some boobs.

Final Thoughts:

A little brief since I'm leaking snot like an open faucet (thanks, family), but I don't think anybody will be rushing to defend this any time soon. It spirals out of control into a weird Final Fantasy last boss out of goddamned nowhere after keeping the magic pretty restrained for most of the run, and is constantly making up rules about the few powers and magical objects it has only to immediately break them. It introduces a veritable stable of characters (to be in the harem) and then proceeds to drop or ignore virtually all of them. If the main ones had an actual relationship or they spent any time building it up, perhaps that could've carried the dramatic side, but Monmon and Jeanne are only ever played off for giggles until someone goes "maybe things aren't as perfect as you thought" and that causes paroxysms of angst to afflict them. On top of this, the budget is pretty lacking. They try for a lot of the action scenes, granted, but the animation just isn't there to make them be the badasses that it wants them to be.

At its best, its a corny low end LN harem affair, but it spends most of its time running away from that 'strength' and attempting to ascribe excessive depth and meaning to jack squat even as the final boss gets cornier and cornier.

Winter season preview should be up tomorrow. It's a little shorter than previous ones for a few reasons, the main one of which is that over a third of the shows next season are sequels/reboots.