天下制覇

Ugh. Why?

Impressions:

There’s really no two ways around it. This episode was just plain bad in just about every single sense of the word and easily the worst episode of this show. The production was especially horrible. They were reduced to stealing stills from the OP as well as multiple minute+ sequences of yet more stills with just the test questions popping up. Some of those were probably relatively funny, but hell if I know because they popped up for half a second before disappearing again. I’m not going to bloody pause the show just so I can see what the joke was. 

This was just a horrible horrible way for the show to end and I really don’t even want to sully the other 12 good episodes by dwelling on it.

Final thoughts at the bottom. Edit: Yes, I know that news of a ‘continuation’ is posted on the official site, but given the date and the fact that there was absolutely no indication of that in the episode, I have a hard time thinking it’s real.

VERY Brief Summary:

Unhappy with how things ended, Yoshii demands a rematch. To his surprise, Class A wants one too, but since the rules are absolute, they settle for a test showdown between Shouko and Yoshii, winner gets a request granted. First person to miss a question loses, but after a night of studying, Yoshii’s on kind of an idiot savant tear until he’s forced to break out one of his magical mecha pencils… which saves the day. Yuuji knows that Shouko threw the test though, so they have a nice little moment in the hall. Yoshii makes his request; to let Himeji retake the test so she can be in the right class. Himeji aces it, but shows up in F the next day because she erased her name off it after she finished. Yoshii gets pissed off and goes running off to complain about it, prompting the entire cast to call him an idiot.

Final Thoughts:

Final episode aside, this was a great series. I do wish that we had seen a lot more of the summoning battles, but it remained charming throughout anyway. I’m not certain how Silver Link managed to go from Tayutama to this, but hopefully they’ll be able to keep it up in the future. The biggest strength of the show is definitely the humor and the characters. There’s a huge cast, but they’re all unique, fun, and the melodrama is pretty much always played off for laughs. They all get along and look out for each other, even the most perverse and strange of the lot, so it’s hard to not like them. I think even the evil cheater was getting to be kind of fun once he was forced into and embraced his new life in a skirt.

By the same token though, Yoshii’s probably the show’s biggest weakness. In a diverse cast of energetic and funny characters, his main role is to stand around and go "Durrrrrrrr." He has his moments, but he’s definitely the weak link in the chain. The show could have also been a lot more evenly produced. Even again discounting the final episode, there were a few in the middle where things got… a bit visually rough at times. The story also felt a little undirected more than once, which often worked out fine because it had the chops to carry itself on humor alone, but like I said, I really enjoyed the battle bits of this and would have loved to see more of them.

Don’t let all that detract though. This is a fantastic 12 episode comedy full of wit and charm, plus one more unneeded melodramatic dumb episode as a stinger at the end that I’m perfectly happy recommending to just about anybody.