天下制覇

I miss Nao’s friends.

Impressions:

A very by-the-books ending, but not badly handled at all. Thankfully, they all but completely drop Princess and her sister out of this to focus back on Nao for the first time since around episode 6, but it still lacked the energy that made a lot of the early episodes so funny. Nao still works best when she has other characters in the background looking aghast at whatever strange things she’s concocting or delusions she’s making and this unfortunately didn’t have her moms or friends there to fill that role. Still, Zexcs was clearly just trying to put a little bit of emotion into the episode to go out with a ‘touching’ episode and I’ve seen far far far worse from anime before. They did it without the cast having to all break character and stuck to what the show’s always done (ie, humor) until the very end. That’s commendable given how few shows actually do that. Plus, as far as this season goes with how almost every other show has spiraled into disaster, in comparison, this knocked it out of the park. Or would have if the last line hadn’t been the show’s title. Curse you, corny lines.

I do wish that they had pulled up the sickness angle sooner though. They could have done a lot more with the trio all trying to minister to him, especially coming on the tails of the AGE’s crappy little discarded porn-hunt. Hell, they could have easily stretched that out to cover the entire episode. Not that Mayoinnaise Time with maid Nao (and her magical size-changing pot!) was bad, but if the show was really trying to get back to the basics of the girls unintentionally torturing him while attempting to seduce him, a fever’s a perfect excuse. Alas, it was not meant to be.

Final thoughts at the bottom.

Final Thoughts:

Well, only partially final since there’s one more episode coming in a few months with the DVDs. In the end, this turned out to be a fairly decent comedy. Not a great one, but an overall very solid one. Consistently well made, and while not visually impressive, never visually dull, with the art style used well to compliment the show. Other than the show’s somewhat excessive use of the piano version of its main thing, I’m not sure I can recall having much to complain about in its technical production at all. Even the massive full screen censoring was charming in its own way. It’s rare that a show does so little wrong on that front that it’s easy to focus on the content instead.

My main issues with it arise from its relatively poor use of its cast, Nao and Iroha especially, and that it simply wasn’t particularly amibitious. The early episodes with them had a manic edge to them where they were really pushing the torture of Shuusuke far enough for the show to be really funny. Kondo had that with him occasionally too, but not as much, and the entire Princess arc at the end was just plain weak and out of place for the show. That doesn’t take away from the fact that the early episodes really were quite good and there were some more excellent ones along the way, the beach and festival episodes in particular, it was just disappointing to see the good parts of the show disappear to make way for much weaker characters like the AGE and Princess.

It’s a good show overall, and well worth at least checking out. It’s a sexual comedy that remembers to use sex for jokes instead of pandering, although I’m sure the tongue-in-cheek humor won’t fit everybody’s taste. Fie on them, I say. Fie.