天下制覇

The neck-breaking head tilts and closeups of Ameno-Sagiri couldn’t belong to anybody else.

P4’s broadcast was pushed back 45 minutes this week, so without Guilty Crown or Milky Holmes filling up my usually busy Thursday mornings, I thumbed through Soccer Galaxy and the last episode of Kill Me Baby. I’ve… made better decisions. Space Soccer remains almost bizarrely watchable though. There must be something wrong with my diet.

Impressions:

Things were going decently… or at least about as well as the show normally handles the end of its arcs for the first half. Right up until about when Yuu began to fight back. You can tell the exact moment when everybody at AIC realized "Oh crap, we need to wrap this up and FAST. The battle music kicks in, Yuu beats Adachi in about three attacks, and then the giant eyeball pops out to spend the next third of the episode explaining the entire story. Thanks, giant eyeball. That wasn’t clumsy, awkward, or horrible in the slightest.

It does look like they’re saving the super AWESOME team up of all the social links for the OVA in the final DVD coming in August. The teamup here was just using all the party members and their evolved personas to save Yuu from being sucked into the eyeblob while a particularly inappropriate insert song played. This was really the best way they could think of handling this? A minute long montage of every single character’s persona evolving and then turning into a blob of light? At least Yosuke’s yanked Yuu out of the blob. And then with their combined power, Yuu summons Lucifer to just blast Ameno in one go before it’s time for the ending. Nobody pay any attention to the fog-in-the-city plot that we introduced and forgot about over approximately 120 seconds worth of screentime.

Well, aside from practically everything involving Ameno Sagiri, it was an okay ending, I guess. Or about as good as most episodes of this show have been. There’ve certainly been worse endings this season. I don’t know if that’s a standard I’d brag about though.

Preview:

Yuu returns, twice as disco as before.

Final Thoughts:

Let’s start with the bad. The show has a number of production issues. The janky art and photo-blurred backgrounds are livable, but the action scenes that are the culmination to every art were almost all dull and generic at best. Sometimes they did better than that, Mitsuo’s shadow for example, but that was rare and the climaxes mostly fizzled because they didn’t have the buildup or the execution to give them any impact. Unlike the game, it didn’t have long dungeons to act as the buildup. Characters here just popped in, found the boss immediately, and Bob’s your uncle. In fact, many of the most boring parts of the show came from when it just stuck right to the game, particularly when it sat down and had long… long… exposition episodes ripped straight from it. The meandering social link episodes usually weren’t very good either, although a couple (namely the detective Nanako thing in the middle of the show) were handled fairly well.

The times when the show was at its best was when it more or less eschewed the original’s presentation and struck out to do its own thing. There were certainly a few cases where things ended up far far worse for that, absolutely everything having to do with Naoto’s shadow for example, but when the show actually adapted material and added their own touches, it usually turned out quite well. At the end of the day though, there’s not a ton that really stands out to me as I try to think back, and that’s not a good thing. It’s certainly a competent adaptation that probably won’t ruffle very many fan feathers, but there’s too much chaff and too little memorable about it for me to consider it anything more than maybe slightly above average at best.