天下制覇

What? Wasn’t the Playstationery 4 a huge flop?

Impressions:

Yawn. What basically amounts to a filler episode about a side character who has never been relevant after the plot for the show is over. Why would you even do this? Was this episode not finished in time? And it was so important that they had to tuck it at the end to get those last few things in? And then, as if I needed a reason to hate them more, Masamune and Kureha had to dress up as Aria and Natsuru. And having Masamune hum the opening theme in the shower? You are trying my patience to the very end here.

Otherwise… who cares? An episode about Narumi featuring Kureha and Masamune following her around. A bunch of characters that have done nothing but drag down an already decidedly mediocre show. Fantastic way to end it. Aside from gawking at Narumi’s breasts, the episode peaked with Konoe’s cross-city ninja sprint. After that, it was all Narumi flouncing around plus sparklies tossed in towards the end to let you know that it was supposed to be an emotional moment. At least it wasn’t cherry blossoms.

Just FYI, the show’s usual next episode preview spot was taken up by a promo for that No Friends show, looking even more generic than the OVA.

Final thoughts at the bottom.

Final Thoughts:

This started as a fairly harmless comedy that mainly distinguished itself through particularly strange music and shooting through all the cliches that it abused at a pace that would make the Flash’s head spin. That was pleasantly watchable, and even cute at times, but then we hit around episode 5 or so and its focus drifted off to other characters, only returning to the main characters when it felt the need to pretend like the show has gravitas. Even more unfortunately, all the new characters were terrible caricatures even more threadbare than the main cast.

It ran through all that without pausing for a moment as well, but at some point, they figured out that it would be extra-dramatic if they shifted things by five minutes so they could end on a ‘cliffhanger’ introduced in the last couple minutes then resolve it in less time than it takes the opening sequence to run. Production was surprisingly good all around though, barring the weird music, so it did that well at least.

Overall, it’s okay, but not much more than that. Its nonsensically fast pacing (that still never really went anywhere) was a nice balance to all the other shows on Thursdays that struggled the entire 13 weeks to get anything done at all, but beyond that, it’s not really that funny, not really that cute, and not particularly well-written. It doesn’t get anything right enough (or wrong enough, to be honest) to distinguish itself from the legion of other shows nearly identical to it.