天下制覇

Holy Zeus, am I sick of montages this season.

Impressions:

A pity the second/third parts were so bad because the first was almost decent. Aside from the fact that it was mostly a montage, for this show, it would almost be good. It told more than four jokes. That’s… practically unheard of. Of course, the big dramatic volleyball match finish was a little silly since Goro wasn’t at match point anyway, but that’s why the only good volleyball match in anime’s entire history was the Galaxy Angel episode where most of the cast was dead from using their ultimate self-sacrifice techniques before the first successful serve.

Unfortunately, the whole episode was weighed down by the existence of not one, not two, not three, but four goddamned montages. The whole "Squid loses her powers, decides to stop being Squid, goes back to being Squid" was a poor enough way to finish the show, but they seriously did not need to make it worse with this particular brand of nonsense. I understand that there’s apparently an insatiable need to abandon your show’s premise and atmosphere so that you can cram some drama in for the last ten minutes and pretend like that gives it closure, but couldn’t you have at least found something less flimsy and transparently obvious than "I’m giving up everything about me." "No, we loved you the way the were all along!"

Final thoughts at the bottom.

Final Thoughts:

I think this may be the show that disappointed me the most this season from the get-go. I expected much more than a blatant Keroro ripoff with a stable of identical characters that trades almost exclusively on oneof them making silly faces. The show’s production and music were fine, but the writing slowed everything to a crawl. There simply was little to no unpredictability to any of it and the jokes were so drawn out that the punchlines almost invariably came minutes after the setup. Humor needs to be snappy; the premise for each joke does not need to be carefully crafted, repeated, told, and then often, repeated. Hell, watching the OP is enough to deduce a significant percentage of the jokes in the show. It almost makes me think that the OP literally provided them for a checklist of gags.

Every now and then, it did do something a little clever or find a good pace for a few minutes, but that was the exception, not the rule and tapered off significantly in the second half. To this day, I still have no idea where the Mini-Squid segment came from. It was brilliance in a sea of mediocrity. I guess the best I can say is that if you’ve never seen Keroro and would prefer to see a cute girl doing comedy poorly instead of aliens, frogs, ninjas, mecha, and alien ninja frogs doing humor well, then this is the show for you. If you have seen any part of Keroro, there’s nothing here for you at all. Even aside from that, there are countless better comedies out there as well. Just look at some screencaps of Squid looking silly, watch the mini-Squid episode, and call it a day.