天下制覇

Seriously, Ichika. Lay off the morphine.

Impressions:

Well, it was about what you’d expect, aside from the bizarre dream sequence where Ichika communes with… I don’t even know what… the heart of his IS or something, and requests more power from it to protect his companions. Which somehow heals his wounds and powers his suit. It’s probably better to just not ask. Given the number of weird visions Ichika’s been having lately, I think somebody spiked his food with something other than male enhancements. So off he flies to the rescue of everybody else, but not before remembering to pick up a new ribbon for Houki’s birthday (seriously… what?) which apparently powers up her IS as well… which lets her power up his. The more I think about it, the more it makes my head hurt.

It was another okay episode though. While action packed, most of it continued to be of the variety where all you can see are specs in the distance sort of bouncing off each other before bullets randomly shoot out of the other one. Lingyin wins the award for being the most useless in the final confrontation with Whitey. I think she forgot that she was supposed to attack. I am a little bit surprised that they showed Ichika actually trying to kiss Houki at the end, but it should come as no surprise that the rest of the harem was there to literally open fire because of it. And the endless cycle of harem dynamics continues unchecked. Hoo-bloody-ray.

Final thoughts at the bottom.

Final Thoughts:

In the end, Infinite Stratos ended up having even less substance than expected, even ignoring the suddenly generated random super important ultra whatever encounter that it chose to end the show with. You can get away without having much of a central plot in a show where things ostensibly keep advancing if your characters are strong enough to carry it on their merits alone. IS did look like it could have succeeded on that front in the early going, and had a lot of the pieces in place to do it. It was relatively well made, free from ridiculous drama, and had a colorful cast, but then didn’t know how to put it all together effectively.

That weakness became more glaring as the show went on. One of the things that I really liked from the start of the show was Ichika’s personality and the way he interacted with the rest of the girls. Unfortunately, by the end of it, that personality was all but gone to make way for the usual anime protagonist denseness and bullheaded cluelessness that ought to be illegal. Other characters suffered similarly, Houki, Lingyin, and Laura in particular. The writers could never really figure out what they wanted to do with them so they ended up being written differently in almost every single one of their scenes.

Overall though, its relatively weak second half keeps it from being a great show, but it’s still far from a bad one. The ending with its sudden nonsensical serious turn and focus on a character who had spent the last 8 episodes being a complete nonentity was disappointing, but even its worst episodes were still mediocre overall. It could have been a lot better if it had kept up the momentum from the early episodes or the writing in general had better focus and some kind of overall plan instead of trying to do a bit of everything. Even if said plan was "Ichika’s wacky antics," that would have most likely improved things.