天下制覇

This would have been a lot more amusing if she was after Ryoko instead.

Impressions:

See? She’s the matchstick girl and her name is Machiko. It’s so hilarious that I want to shoot myself. It’s even more hilarious because she tried using every single bad romantic comedy cliche in the book to try to seduce him as her road to happiness, But Ryoushi doesn’t wanna since girls have cooooooties. Ewwwwwww. Meanwhile, Ryoko and Applehead watch from the bushes just to finish packing every bad date cliche in.  I love cliches! So much that I want to take them behind the middle school and get them pregnant! Okay, I better tone down the sarcasm before I give myself a liver disorder. Machiko’s a poor man’s Yamada at best and tiresome at worst. Mostly the latter since the narrator continues to provide a sustained assault whatever little humor remains in the show by pointing out every joke. It’s seriously like watching television with a three year old. Yes, wow. That’s Elmo, and the letter B. And a Dalek. Don’t tell mommy about that last part.

In any case, after the show essentially ended last week, this was about as brainless as I expected it to be. I suppose that it was meant to be a capstone on Ryoushi and Ryoko’s relationship, but that begs the question "What relationship?" Oh, she said that she doesn’t hate him. I guess we might as well assume that it’s a happy ending all around. Champagne and caviar, folks. This is true love. At least I can’t say that I’m surprised in the slightest. Why end strongly when you can introduce a ‘love’ triangle in the final episode instead? Great decision, JC Staff.

Final thoughts at the bottom.

Final Thoughts:

And it ends with about as much fanfare as it began. The main thing that this show had going for it from start to finish is that there was nothing I was even vaguely interested in watching on Tuesdays or Wednesdays. The action in the first couple weeks was enough to catch my eye and they teased greater plot and drama a couple episodes later, but nothing ever came of any of it. That’s fine for completely comic shows, but you can’t just introduce drama, drop it, bring it back up, then totally ignore it again every third episode and expect things to work out by not even resolving a single piece of it. More anime writers need to figure out that by half-assing the source and their own contributions, they end up doing a crappy job on both sides of the fence and appeasing nobody.

So in the end, bleh from start to finish. There were some moments that were well done, but it was ultimately a totally vacuous show made even more irritating by an omnipresent narrator telling you what is already happening on the screen… to the point where she interrupts characters just to repeat what they already said. Show, don’t tell, is the first blood rule of any narrative, dammit. All I can imagine the point being is to pander to a cadre of Satomi Arai fanboys furiously pleasuring themselves to her voice instead of trying to watch the show. Production was overall mediocre at its best and poor for the other 95% of the time, the drama and characterization heavy handed and unresolved, and the humor ranged from stale to almost offensely juvenile at times, lest we forget the farting witches during the big dramatic climax of the show. If you skipped this or ditched it an episode or two in, you’ve missed absolutely nothing worth seeing. It was something to occupy a boring day and let off a little steam and that’s really about it.