天下制覇

…So this season’s Fridays begin and end with feces. Great.

Impressions:

Even for this show, I expect better than a mess of poop jokes intermixed with the same formula it’s been using all season. I’m also still cross at them for riding this whole proposal thing all the way to the end. I’m probably sounding like a broken record, but it began as a joke in a delusion. Hell, Tomoki even says in this episode that he has no idea what any of them are talking about. Furthermore, including Astraea in a wedding dress in that awful "Choose your bride" scene at the end while she’s ranting about food just made it worse. Tossing Chaos back in to glomp Tomoki just made it worserer…er.

So it was a fairly uninspired ending to what was frankly a pretty uninspired season. They narrowly avoided the Tenchi GXP ending… thank god… but it was so awkwardly led up to and then ‘concluded’ that I was just thankful for it to be over. Even compared to all the other obligatory clumsy and poorly handled drama that comedies feel the need to shoehorn in, it was bad. They’re not fooling anybody with this "We’re going to have an ending here" crap, but to toss all Ikaros’s drama and brooding for the last month aside with "I like things the way they are, let’s not rock the boat" is just terrible. Especially when one has just adopted a mind-raping love-obsessed nun.

Final thoughts at the bottom.

Preview:

Movie preview. Tough beans, Hiyori.

Final Thoughts:

The two things that really hurt this series were its stubborn adherence to the same comic formula episode in and episode out, and some very poorly executed drama. Nymph in particular spent almost the entire season feeling sorry for herself and then it was resolved almost as an aside while other more important things were going on. The first episode (and the OVA just prior to it) were both hilarious, but the show never made it quite back to that same level of unpredictability and energetic delivery. Instead, it gradually fell into a rut of just changing the scenario but doing the same jokes week after week. This also wasn’t helped by some bizarre plot threads that never actually went anywhere; Hiyori being the main one, but Sugata’s adventures into Synapse as well.

The show really does have a lot going for it with very solid production, good music, and competent direction, but the writing simply failed it at amost every turn. Character development should have been better paced and handled, jokes should have been far more varied, and the angst should not have been all concentrated on a single point in the series that was resolved in a 15 second speech. It’s not a bad show by any means, but it could have been much, much better if the writing had been a lot tighter or if they had managed to maintain the same level of energy in the first couple episode through the whole thing.