天下制覇

If you wanted to strangle him, you should have started at the neck, not the cheeks.

Impressions:

Meh, about what I expected. A little bit of budget, bluster, and posturing for once since it’s the big finale followed by a whole lot of awkwardness and an unfulfilling ending. I’d make a sex joke here, but I don’t think the show’s worthy of even that anymore. Especially when a healthy chunk of this episode involved multiple Sions with one of them sitting on Lyner. Damn, there’s the sex joke. If there’s nothing more entertaining than one Sion moping around, it’s two. Anyway, at least the action at the start was decent and back to the levels of the opening episodes some six months ago. Pity that the show’s over! Also a pity that Sion only actually attacked Lyner twice, both of which were recycled from last week’s footage. The rest was magic zombie fighting or the demon throwing swords to get close enough to caress him. Man, can’t get away from the sex jokes…

*ahem* Lyner refuses to let himself be killed for Ferris’s sake, but then after the demon takes Sion over completely, Lyner’s saved by Poorly-Explained-Plot-Device leaping out of his body and convincing everybody that now’s not the time. Blah blah blah. Confusing dream/not-dream sequence blah blah day(s) later, and Sion’s declared war on the world and Lyner’s off on a new adventure, vowing to save him. They had to try to shoehorn some bad romance in with Ferris in literally the eleventh hour too. …And show every single one of the cast in the epilogue too… which started at around 18 minutes in mind you. I’m not sure you want to spend 20% of your last episode on an epilogue calling attention to the lack of an ending and reiterating all the characters and plots that the writers forgot about weeks or months ago. Par for the course, I suppose.

Final thoughts at the bottom.

Final Thoughts:

Leaving aside the lack of resolution, all the dangling plot threads, the random characters still running around, the lack of an antagonist… wait, no. Unresolved potential is exactly the problem with this show. It certainly does quite a few things right, but the story floundered with Sion’s uninteresting paperwork adventures for most of the first half and spiraled off in completely random directions for almost all of the second half by continuously introducing new characters without any relation to the main characters at all. The show would be no different if they had skipped the entire happenings of King Gastark for example. Nothing they did had any direct or indirect impact on the story in the slightest.

The second half also suffered from a frankly embarrassing drop in production. Recycled footage by way of flashbacks became constant and the action scenes all but vanished. Combine that with them also recycling the same drama and angst from the first half for the entire bloody show predicated on a premise opposite of what they spent the entire series showing… and the show quickly turned into a chore. There was still the occasional silliness to look forward to and the show has so many characters that a few of them were still always fun to see, but overall, the lack of focus was hard to swallow, the lack of character growth or development boring, and the poor production damning.

All in all, I really wouldn’t recommend this for anybody but the most insatiable fantasy adventure fans. It’s aggressively mediocre at best, and that’s on a good day. The show simply doesn’t know what it wants to be and the most tedious character to watch is the only one that shows an ounce of development during the entire eight hour affair. It has its moments, but they’re few and far between… and saturated in a thick coat of the same bit of drama applied over and over again. If you dropped it or were wondering whether to pick it up, I really wouldn’t. The only payoff is making fun of Sion’s master plan to stroke Lyner and sit on him. And now I’ve ruined even that for you.