天下制覇

I refuse to accept a magical death unless it has blue sparklies.

Impressions:

Well, it was a bit better than I expected it to be, but you know me and recycled footage. Ange’s death scene at the start was particularly godawful. I swear that they just cycled between those same four shots of Beatrice, Lambda/Bern, Ange, and Battler’s face for about two straight minutes, just adding a little more blood to one of them each time. That also certainly didn’t help inject any kind of drama in the scenes either. Nothing like seeing everybody’s face frozen in stone to really get you to empathize with them. Although that may also be the fault of Battler throwing a massive hissy fit every time over the smallest things. That makes him just shrugging his shoulders when people around him die seem a taaaad bit emotionless.Things didn’t really improve too much in the production department in the second half either, but I suppose that’s to be expected. It still would have been nice if they showed what Battler was theorizing instead of just some ugly outline of a person along with a clips show. Or my favorite, their diagrams that probably took them upwards of 30 seconds to make using MSPaint.

I’m not even sure why we’re supposed to buy that Beatrice was doing anything aside from dicking around with Battler at the end either. The last major interaction they had, literally, was her playing him like a fiddle, and pretending to be killed. But this time… this time’s special. Or something. Whatever. We’ve already seen that Battler’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Hell, I think the sporks may have him beat. Speaking of that… despite all the silly spears and KINZO-DRAGONS flying around, the big blue/red showdown seemed a bit aborted. Beatrice undercut approximately one of his umpteen pages worth of blue text and spent the rest of the time going "Wow, you’re awesome. Let’s make out." And being stabbed, but again… that’s how we ended the previous arc too. As highly as I value Battler’s inane bomb theories, it just makes it seem even more likely that Beatrice is screwing with him… only that punchline never comes and then the show ends.

Finalish thoughts at the bottom.

Final Thoughts:

I know that I’m really going out on a limb here, but this just hasn’t been a particularly good show in just about any way. It manages to carry some of the interesting ideas over from the original, but the direction, art, animation, and pacing could probably be described as marginally average at best. Deen further exacerbated this by eschewing the main characters for the previous 20 episodes in the final arc just for one who was machinated out of thin air and now has vanished back into the void. I’m not entirely certain what else to say beyond that, as I doubt anybody is going to be rising up to sing this show’s praises. Admittedly, it certainly could have been worse in a lot of ways, but sometimes… it’s hard exactly to imagine how.