天下制覇

Yes, puns. It was that kind of episode.

Impressions:

Well, if you were wondering how they were going to end this, it’s the deus ex machina ending with sparkly bubblies everywhere. Lots of deus ex machina. All over the bloody place. Let’s talk about the good first though. The fight was long and it was very well animated. I also laughed at the episode a lot. Okay, that’s enough of the good.

Let’s go on to the bad. The camera work during the fight nearly made me nauseous. It would regularly be upside down, or fly between the two of them as they fought or just spin at strange angles. It almost felt like I was watching an N64 game desperately try to reposition its camera inside walls and through corners. The fight was also continuously broken up by cutting away to people clamoring over their devalued money while [C] finally hit Japan turning all the midas money into dust. This also had the effect of causing Mikuni and Q’s powers to fail at random during the fight, saving Kimi and MSYU from the time stop/Economic Blockade stuff and/or being vivisected. Continuing on with the poor direction of the fight, like many of the fights so far, it featured MSYU and Kimi getting beat up, cut in half, half-eaten, and otherwise bodily molested without landing a single attack other than stirring morality speeches until finally… at the very very end, Kimimaro managed to stab Mikuni once. That was apparently enough for the win. My brain twitched a little bit there.

But wait, there’s more. [C] hits Japan as their battle ends and does… nothing. I’m not even… I don’t… What? They switched to the dollar and suddenly… immunity to doom. Why not gold pressed latinum? And after that dubious win, Kimimaro tosses his magic card up, closes the Financial District and everything is changed by the power of magic sparklies into a happy endings. Well, except the assets are gone and he’s back to being useless… literally now, which is totally different from the last ten episodes where he could have interacted with people but didn’t. Now he just can’t. But not before MSYU tackles and kisses him. After being previously rejected under suspicions of being his sister. What do you want me to feel here, Tatsunoko? Meanwhile, the clown had another clowngasm. Frankly, at this point, I think he just celebrates life, no matter what happens.

Actually though, this was probably the best end to a bad situation. There were enough flashing lights and absurd developments to keep me laughing at the show and the few times that the camera wasn’t upside down or spinning out of control, the action was enjoyable too. I just thankt the gods that they didn’t try to tie in the random other dangling ends like Hanabi or Kimimaro’s father and decided to just run to the end with five minutes of sparkly bubbles making the whole world right.

Oh yeah, and Q is Mikuni’s sister. That was a shocking twist that nobody saw coming, I’m sure.

Final thoughts at the bottom.

Final Thoughts:

From start to finish, this show was always more concerned with building the world itself than remembering to populate it with characters that the audience should care about. Kimimaro and Jennifer were the most severe violators of this, especially in their interactions with each other. Kimimaro was completely passive to the world and all going on around him. He only took action at the predetermined end of the show and even that was driven by a total asspull by fabricating a magical credit card out of thin air. Meanwhile, Jenny just spewed out expositional dump after expositional dump without actually having any kind of emotional reaction or involvement to anything. Even at the end, the only reason ever given as to why she apparently spent hours upon hours explaining the facts of life to Kimimaro is because Mikuni took a passing interest in him.

That would lead into damning issue #2, the story telling. While it presents an interesting world, instead of letting the concepts they present organically grow in through the characters interacting with the world and each other, they just keep stacking more things on and building in completely arbitrary directions. Is the show about economics? Is the show about Kimimaro’s dad? Is the show about Kimimaro’s future? The answer to that question varies wildly from episode to episode with no coherence. What’s more, because they spend the entire series stacking things on instead of developing existing threads, everything is only skin deep and begins to collapse with any serious thought is applied. For example, the show presents a philanthropist creating futures for the underpriviledged in one week, then two weeks turns around and presents that the use of the very same midas money causes futures to disappear. The moral dilemma that they just spent almost 10% of the show on was just completely forgotten. There was also never any actual endgame in sight, made all the more obvious by the sparklies-solve-all victory scenario.

In the end, the creative direction is really the only solid part of the show and even that was full of some really terrible decisions, mostly involving jump cuts. Production was otherwise far too inconsistent for it to be even recommendable for its battles. It had a lot of potential at the start, but all it did was create a framework for a setting without populating it with any compelling reason anybody should care.