天下制覇

At least Short Round wasn’t secretly friends with the Monkey King.

Impressions:

After nearly two years since the last special, a change of studios, and some of the VAs at this point so old and riddled with throat cancer that they’ve had to recast them, I was expecting much better. This is extremely mediocre and not even close to The Last Job, but it’s the drop in art quality and production in general that disappointed me the most. How did Fujiko go from this last time to what she looks like here? Did recasting her really do her that much damage? Adding a plucky little fangirl sidekick who is somehow able to track Lupin down as well as break into places ahead of him did not help either. There was seriously the line "I’m 14 years old, I’m not a kid anymore!" and then she stumbled around conviently triggering hidden doors while shrieking her head off. Also, she just happens to later turn out to be associated with the whole mermaid legend. You really need to knock this crap off, Japan. 20 minutes ago, she was running a popcorn stand. 10 minutes ago, she was a Lupin wannabe, and now she’s having flashbacks about how she’s the childhood friend of an immortal.

The actual plot otherwise is about what you may guess. Immortal mermaid as damsel in distress, need gems, steal her blood, yada yada, turn into biological monster. Okay, the last part’s less normal for Lupin, but it seemed like they felt the need to make this installment dark for some bizarre reason, not just with Villain du Jour, Himuro, shooting people in the face after pumping them full of mermaid blood, but even Lupin and Jigen were shooting/knifing people left and right. They usually comically just manage to shoot weapons out of hands or have them fall backwards. An entire squadron of SWAT members running from the HORROR of popcorn carts is corny, but at least it’s in character for the show. Jigen jamming a knife in the back of a fleeing security guard’s skull? Not so much. 

The ending was also pretty awful. After Maki gives a horrible speech about wanting to get stronger for Misa, Misa out of nowhere kicks into super ultra mermaid mode. Maki didn’t even do anything besides give her speech. She wasn’t even attacked. Misa just suddenly out of nowhere began glowing and making Homuro convulse, letting them behead him, shoot the head, shoot the body, and then dump it in lava which appeared out of absolutely nowhere. And then there was a flashback about previous Lupin the first also being associated with the mermaid tossed in literally as the cave was collapsing. Again, cut this crap out, Japan.

So bleh. Everything was a sharp step down from The Last Job which already had its own share of production issues. Adding some plucky little kid to show up Lupin was also just a horrendous decision. It hasn’t been that long since the Conan special and at least he’s supposed to be a genius instead of some little brat selling popcorn. I didn’t really care much one way or the other for the voice actor changes in the face of everything else wrong with this special, so at least they weren’t irritatingly bad, but this was probably the worst of the recent specials since the mostly incomprehensible Red vs Green.