天下制覇

It feels like it’s been awhile since I made a pokemon joke about this show.

Whew. Finally caught up. Kind of. The third Tethe’alla OVA came out while I was gone, but doesn’t appear to be available anywhere. I guess that means I’m good now… just in time for about three or four OVAs this week!

Impressions:

Well, I don’t really know. It’s an ending, but everything being restored to the status quo felt pretty artificial and Karasuba’s fight was just there for the sole purpose of adding a little action to the last episode. I’m not sure how they could have really salvaged it at this point into too much better though. It suffered even more than the first season from its final arc not really having much of anything to do with the main characters and just being about them helping some random persons that will never be seen in the show again. This one was probably worse since the good guys lost pretty much every single battle in the end but won the war because the bad guy simply up and walked away at the end of it all without a single one of them even landing a blow on her.

The brief bits they animated were nice, and the music good, but it still served no actual purpose and more disappointingly, ended without the rest of the team actually doing anything. I miss the days day when Minato had a pair of balls too. What ever happened to him shoulder tackling the enemy instead of trying to use his soft flesh as a guard against blades. Couldn’t he have at least picked up a pipe and tried to fight instead of whining and curling up in a ball on top of Musubi? Hell, I still have yet to figure out why Minato never kisses them for their power up before battles in the first place. Especially after people start yelling how X is not strong enough to beat Y. Maybe sekirei have chronic halitosis along with their chronic inevitable spine problems from the WMDs attached to their chests.

Final thoughts at the bottom.

Final Thoughts: 

It was a decent sequel, but suffered from meandering around fairly aimlessly through the second half of the show and never really coming to a climax. A collapsing building was the most threatening antagonist going into the final episode before Karasuba leapt in with a cry of "We must kung-fu fight." All the parts were there, but pretty similar to the first season, it just kind of ended without resolving anything. They’ve got decent antagonists pouring out of the woodwork, but can’t seem to focus on any one of them for long enough to actually get any inertia, even going so far as to switch antagonists multiple times mid-arc.

That’s really the biggest issue with the show in the later going. Seven Arcs just never managed to inject any real sense of importance into anything but Uzume’s death. Most of what happened boiled down to glorified fetch quests handed out from on high like this was some kind of demented clone of Endless Frontier, with slightly less bounciness. They did do a very good job with the introductory arc and I’m glad that Uzume stayed dead (for now) after a grievous injury, unlike some other shows I could name. It wouldn’t take much to bring her back though, but let’s just leave that aside for now.

Overall, I’d say it was a step down from the first season and dragged through the second half, but is still a solid action show and better than most. It does what it does competently with Seven Arcs’s now almost traditional pacing issues. You should still start with the first season if you’re interested though. Seven Arcs all but screamed SEQUEL COMING at the end of it, so I assume that they’ll spit out another season in a couple years after they cough up some more Nanoha. I still say that they should just take the premise and go wild with it instead of waiting for the source to excrutiatingly slowly build up. Of course, I also want them to make more Inukami, so perhaps they just hate me. I may as well wish for a unicorn that craps buffalo wings while I’m at it.