天下制覇

What? We’re actually going with this? Uh… all right.

Sorry this is late. It’s usually up right away, but the TVK broadcast was apparently interrupted by an earthquake notification or something, so, like a fool, I assumed that the other two broadcasts today would be up shortly after. Apparently that was extremely stupid of me. I finally got fed up and went through the hassle of just ripping out the Niconico stream hours after the fact.

Impressions:

Man, who is this show kidding? So much angst over Hentai Mask. No magical boy ever died in shorts strapped to a treadmill. Definitely the weakest episode in at least a few weeks for the show. Instead of the "marshalling your forces for the final battle" episode, it was mostly angsting around, but the development isn’t there at all to take this seriously and it wasn’t really bad enough for me to have fun mocking it either. At least aside from Kurumi just happening to have some random glowing thing capable of shutting down an entire room of mecha. I’m pretty sure that would have been useful at some point in the past. Or maybe even when you first started fighting them. Salome was (as is often the case) the only good source of humor in the episode. Trader’s not really being an impressive final villain either. All he has so far is a magical shield and some statues with a bunch of magical thingies on them.

Some of it would have worked a lot better if it had been given more time to develop, particularly Tesla and Nine’s whole deal as well as Haruka’s PTSD over not being able to save Hentai Mask. All those episodes in the middle they spent putzing around with Saijou still  have yet to actually go anywhere while Tesla and Nine are seemingly just spewing out random things that they haven’t shown at all, like formerly hating the world. I was actually kind of interested to see if they were going to go anywhere with Aoi wondering if something was wrong with her for not being emotionally affected by what happened and wants to move on instead. It’s something anime usually doesn’t go anywhere near when there’s a chance to wallow in self-doubt and pity. That didn’t really go anywhere either, but it was vaguely interesting for at least a moment.

On the upside, glossing over them has done wonders for keeping all the melodrama very nicely compact and not as overwrought as so… so many other series I could name. "We’re not related, but he raised us and he’s our father. That’s why it’s up to us to stop him." That’s literally about the extent of their agonizing, flashbacks, and soul searching. Not bad for a pair of twins with two dads, one dead and one genocidal. Haruka and Aoi’s origin story was also similarly short and to the point. To an incredibly stupid point, yes, but that’s still how flashbacks should be handled. Brief, interwoven into current events, and adding to what the characters were already saying and doing. Neither of those flashbacks even needed to actually be visually shown. They could have just panned over the characters talking and the same information would have been conveyed, but really most importantly, they were used to a very specific point adding to the current scene instead of fabricating some event in the past that has never been mentioned before but is now suddenly the entire raison d’être. Well, that and the ones here were again… brief. That can’t really be emphasized enough.

I guess it’s just more evidence for my belief that there are two to three guys on this project who know exactly what they’re doing and are quite good at it… and thirty-four others trying to get high by mainlining baking soda.

Preview:

Obligatory team up to defeat the evil… satellite?