天下制覇

What the hell just happened here?

Yeah, yeah. A little late. It still hasn’t shown up on the normal quick streaming sites. *shrug*

Impressions:

So in the end, this was basically just a rehash of the first Onigashima invasion. They made it up to Shiro’s office, Ryoushi got smacked around, then landed one punch, and everybody went home happy. In another world, where Shiro actually had some kind of plan and Ryoushi wasn’t flashing back to a conversation he had with literally three minutes ago as his dramatic heroic spirit move (with a character fabricated out of thin air an episode ago no less), this could have been really cool. Or maybe if the whole thing wasn’t called on account of stupid. At least they put some effort into the action once again. It’s still that horrific "we made the art suck balls to give ourselves extra cash for the frames" trick that JCStaff seems enamored of lately, but it’s something.

I’d say that the bigger problem with the episode beyond the bizarrely fabricated melodrama from nowhere and much ado over literally nothing was the mood whiplash. The first half of the episode was devoted to defusing all of the cliffhanger kidnappings from last week by revealing all of them to be gags. Followed by Majo farting toxic gas multiple times. They literally tried to make a scene with a farting witch dramatic. The mind boggles. Maybe you should have chosen your sound effects a little better, JCStaff. And they never actually addressed Ryoko’s past at all. In fact, the opposite. Reasons don’t matter, Ryoushi! Do your best! The catboy said so!

Honestly though, this episode was a lot better than most and suffers mainly from the fact that there was nothing building up to it and it’s a lot of people getting emotional despite there being absolutely no reason for it. This episode would have been awesome at around #4 or #5. As the big finale though (next week is apparently back to nonsense if the title’s any indication), there’s absolutely no meat or meaning to anything that happened here, which admittedly, is appropriate because nothing did. Kind of the story of this entire show, isn’t it?