天下制覇

At least it started with a joke.

Impressions:

Part 1 was pretty lame. They framed mistakes that have become famous by going to a museum displaying them, and then making simple word slips and whatnot, ending with Kafuka’s claim that the mistakes were so big that yada yada. The whole bit felt more like Seinfeld standup than actual comedy. The second part took about five minutes before it had any kind of theme. Komori’s blanket got blown away and the whole class got sucked into looking for it, and then once a business man got hold of it and discovered its greatness, they started making/selling used Komori blankets to the world. That led into selling everybody’s brand of… er… random objects. Itoshiki had a rant about selling themselves, but the girls insisted that as long as they had him, they were fine and tore him to bits.

The third part was about trends, sorta. It lasted three minutes. The less said, the better. If that wasn’t half-assed enough, they tacked on a little Christmas thing at the very end with an ‘unexpected guest’ that lasted all of 90 seconds before they made us sit through the cast singing a Christmas carol before running 20 seconds of a special ED. At that point, the budget apparently ran oout and they had to fill the last minute with stupid Draw Itoshiki. Lovely. It’s pretty characteristic of this season to limp right up to the finish line.

Final thoughts at the bottom.

Final Thoughts:

Well, I’ll preface this by saying that it was still a decent comedy, but the fact remains that compared to previous seasons, there was a massive decline in production, creativity, and direction. If you want to see the source just dumped straight into an anime with minimal effort and no creativity whatsoever, then great. Shaft has two full seasons worth of character art which they can (and did) use so that they could lurch their way through this one with it only looking moderately cheap most of the time, and pathetically cheap the other 20% or so. Maybe if they hadn’t blown off the equivilent of almost an episode and a half on the Draw Itoshiki and Storytime segments (to say nothing of the other recycling), then they could have at least masked it a little bit better. Nothing says "budget problems" like foregoing animating a full 26 minutes of your show. 

This is particularly disappointing because I know Shaft can do so much better than this. It’s always sad to see a series drop off in quality so immensely, but if they do decide to make more, I hope they can recapture a little bit of that charm and creativity from the first two seasons instead of continuing the blatant time filling and budget saving escapades that they abused to hell through this entire season. Hell, even some competent direction would have made certain parts, especially the segments divided across multiple weeks, a bit more tolerable. Cutting off mid conversation and then picking up the same joke a week later mystifies me. Sadly, it was clear that this was not where Shaft was focusing its efforts this season and it showed. Painfully.

So overall, as a comedy in its own little world, it was decent. Not stellar, but I’ve seen much worse. As a sequel to the second season, it was painfully cheap, uncreative, and completely phoned in. Take that as you will.