天下制覇

Well, this somehow managed to be more unpleasant than expected.

Impressions:

The best part of this episode is that you could see the exact moment that the budget ran out. Everything immediately ground to a halt and then there were about 30 seconds with half a dozen skills before the episode basically ended. The iron masked nun ended up just being Teni possessed by generic evil wraithface who only showed up to kill some random punks, attempt to assassinate Ryuubi, and then remind everybody about Bachou’s brother. Oh yeah, maybe they should have addressed that at some point. Or Bachou’s ‘undying hatred’ for Sousou. Oopsise.

At least it was more amusing than the first half. I remember a time, way back in the first two seasons, when Kann-u was actually threatening and not reduced to abjectly pathetic comic relief. Those were good days. This wasn’t even any kind of ending at all really. Not that I expected them to be able to drag this out of the hole, but they could have at least given Bachou the majority of the screen time to wrap up her stuff instead of 10 more minutes on the lesbians of Seito. No, having the villain monologue at her for a minute or two is more than enough wrapup for a central character.

Final Thoughts:

In short, bleh. It certainly started promisingly enough, then immediately reduced Bachou to mostly sidekick comic relief and got bogged down in the whole fight with Kentei that could have been finished in three or four episodes, but somehow managed to fill the entire season. At the end of it, everything just boiled down to the major theme just being the usual nonsense about fighting against their destinies that the show’s been leaning on since the very first episode of the first season. Not that anybody is watching this for the plot, but the alternative is talking about Si Ma Yi’s evil magic tree that was defeated by a helpless girl with a matchbox. DD’s random flying blue Hakufu in a china dress was at least easy on the eyes.

So in the end, it was a step up over GG, but still behind the first season and well behind DD. It suffers a lot of the same problems as GG, a meandering plot, characters wandering around for no reason, a lack of threatening antagonists, minimal budget, and everything stretched out about four times longer than it needed to be. Seriously, I cannot stress that enough. Kann-u’s fight in Kentei’s little chamber lasted half of the entire season. The only difference is that this had people wandering on an island filled with tribesmen and giant animals instead of picnics with Ryofu and Saji Genpous everywhere.

Sigh. I wish I knew how to stop hurting myself like this.