天下制覇

I almost went with a RagnaROCK joke.

Impressions:

So much for comedy. Not that this was serious at all or I expected anything more than a fanservice episode, but they didn’t even deliver much on that front. It was about one part comedy, four parts fanservice stills, and nineteen parts advertisement for character songs. It was clear that comedy came in at about the third priority this episode behind closeups of breasts, closeups of asses, and most importantly, selling CDs. With the crass commercialism running so thick, it’s hard to pay enough attention to even care about the few half-assed jokes they tossed in. Yes, yes, net idol rankings, etc. Been there, done that a thousand times before. Thanks for adding nothing but Sera and Saras floating naked in space.

There’s not much to say about the content since the first five minutes was little more than a series of stills of the girls in swimsuits and the rest of the episode was each character doing their song in turn while a crowd made of PS1 graphics jumped around. Way to bust the budget here, Deen. My patience with this show after the last four weeks or so of being awful may be stretched a bit too thin. They even found a way to cram Eu’s song in there by way of a literal deus ex machina yanked out of Haruna’s teacher’s skivvies. Plus, I’m not even sure who that girl in the epilogue was supposed to be. Kyouko in a wig?

Final thoughts at the bottom.

Final Thoughts:

This was a very fun, off-kilter show until almost precisely the halfway point where everything just turned to rubble. There were the occasional hiccups through the first half, "suddenly… sky whale!" and the episode based on his friend who never showed up again come to mind, but Deen did an excellent job keeping the start funny and turning it serious for the showdown with Kyouko. They really did a great job in that episode and it’s a crying shame that they couldn’t keep that up for the rest of the show if they wanted to go the serious route.

After that, it careened off of the robot shark mid-jump into a sea of terrible writing and direction. It couldn’t make up its mind whether it wanted certain things to be comedic or serious and wildly oscillated between the two constantly, undermining both sides of it. A giant monster would be a gag for five minutes, and then suddenly it was going to destroy all of creation, only to be stopped by a little bit of handwaving and fabrication on the spot. And it just kept doing that over and over again. The most random of plot twists kept popping up out of nowhere and were then either discarded 5 minutes later or when they committed to them, like the vampire ninja orchestra, ended up having basically nothing to do with the central conflict and their exclusion wouldn’t have affected the story at all. I still to this day have absolutely no idea what was with that thing sealed in Mael. This was made even worse by characters, Eu especially, acting with absolutely no rhyme or reason making the second half of this show just plain frustrating because despite the writing and direction never synced up at all.

So it’s a mixed bag. The first half was very good for the most part which just made seeing it all fall apart in the last month and a half of the show all the more painful. Well made, good antagonist, characters not acting like utter ninnies. The second half is a completely different beast altogether, and unlike, say, Milky Holmes or even Dragon Crisis’s last episode, was never actually manic enough (what’s with me and using ‘manic’ lately?) to be amusing. The way it committed to terrible plot developments while playing maudlin music was excrutiating. I do think that the first half of the show is well worth watching though, just be aware that there’s a steep cliff coming as soon as you hit the halfway mark.