天下制覇

And you thought it wasn’t foreshadowing.

Impressions:

At least they went easy on the angst for the finale. If only the same could be said for its attempts at being serious. Ageha literally popped up out of nowhere and spent a good few minutes spewing out exposition detailing every aspect of the evil evil plan. Same with ol whose his face off in the office. Yamato had his own nonsensical flashback out of nowhere where he had to be told to fight for what’s important to him. Funny thing that. Before I just assumed he was fighting for cake. Then the entire swarm of characters who have barely been seen since the penis festival swarmed in to remind you that they existed. Then one transformed into a mecha that Yamato rode around in. Unfortunately, it wasn’t Kokoro.

They actually did a pretty good job on the action for once this week too. It still often wasn’t great, or even up to the first episode’s level, but it was world’s better than just about anything they’ve done between those two points. I’m a little surprised as to why they suddenly decided to switch up who was fighting who in the pairs of antagonists vs protagonists though. And yes, they had to use the OP as an insert when everybody got their spirits up and do a whole successful one attack each (or not even that… great work there, Mayucchi) before the antagonists went running off.

 Then it had to end with the entire cast yelling out the show’s title. SIGH. Well, there was a little bit after the ED, but eh.

Final thoughts at the bottom.

Final Thoughts:

And so it ends… kind of like it began but with most of the second half having only a few vestiges either of that. It’s a shame too because it was a rather decent comedy at times and the first/last episode did prove that they at least knew how to do action scenes when they had the budget to. The Miyako lead-ins to episodes in particular were great. The show was still woefully underbudgeted and the giant floating censor patches made it questionable why they even bothered at times, but this season did not have many comedies (or at least shows actually intending to be funny), and Majikoi came out of the gates being creative, amusing, and more than a little disturbing at times.

But then… yeah… all the nonsensical melodrama and other nonsense took over, didn’t mix with the comedy at all, and the whole thing was so woefully underbudgeted that I have actually begun feeling sorry for Lerche. Another studio might have just nixed the attempts at action and thrown up long painful stills that lulled me into a dull fog, but not Lerche. They stumbled boldly forward and faceplanted into the pavement half the time. An actual budget to make the fights worth watching would have done worlds for this show. The melodrama would have still be painful and completely out of place in both content and tone… not to mention the woefully underrealized stable of baddies and incredible disappearing rest of the cast, but at least it would have been eyecandy.

In the end, I can’t muster up much more than a meh overall. The first episode and the festival episode were great, with a number of decent segments between the two, but all the serious stuff was pretty awful and the production in general took an absolute nosedive after the first week and didn’t recover until literally the last episode. I think they would have done much better to just stick with being silly the whole way through instead of trying to go from penis jokes into… well… this.