天下制覇

And oddly, that was probably the best part of the entire second half, not counting Afro Skeleton.

Impressions:

Don’t let the caps of the second half fool you. I can literally count the number of times Shana even tried to attack on one hand. And since I can, I will. She cut off MechaSyd’s arm, punched Yuuji, threw rings at him, headbutted him, and then waved her her sword in generic fire attack #224. The rest of the time they spent shouting platitudes at each other about who was protecting who and who was doing what for whose sake. All while riding around on their giant creatures. Made even more ridiculous by said giant creatures being locked in mortal combat the entire time. So what if Bearhydra just had a head pulled off and they’re rolling around in the ocean? That’s no reason to not cut away from them to give Shana and Yuuji a couple minutes of closeups on their head to yell at each other. At least, bizarrely enough, they did a decent job making CG MechaSyd actually look okay for once, although a lot of that was probably helped by everything glowing neon at that point so even the regular art was suffused in bloom. Mechasyd and Bearhydra knew well enough to just shut up and try to hit each other, making a battle between two bits of ridiculous nonsense somehow both the most stomachable fight since I think episode 4.

Regardless of how the second half almost came together for a not-horrible ending, the first was still the same usual terribleness that has plagued the entire show. Shana and Yuuji stood around on the sidelines while irrelevant characters did irrelevant things of little to no import. I could not care less about all these minor side characters saying goodbye, or the wailing demonspawn of Johan and Pheles. And I especially could not possibly care less about Yoshida. They could not be trying harder to jam her into relevancy (and failing, mind you) unless they were directly applying a crowbar to the show. At least the long nightmare is finally over.

Final Thoughts:

This season was a mess, but the primary issues fall down to characers and direction. The main characters were barely guests in their own show and almost every fight scene was just a generic pastiche of barely introduced flame hazes cooking utterly generic denizens, often ugly CG and even more often recycled designs from previous shots of them dying. It’s hard to even numerate how many things Shana the character actually did besides show up to get lectured at. She fought Yuuji once, was captured, fought a camel, and then sort of fought him again. And that’s literally it, all but one of those taking place in the first half of the show. Yuuji wasn’t any better either, especially for supposedly being the centerpiece. Even forgetting the retcon at the start, his sole purpose seemed to be to deliver technobabble exposition. Nothing brings this to a point better than the way the show ended, with Yuuji and Shana floating in the sky, staring at each other for literally a month before suddenly whipping out some horrible (and literal!) deus ex machina, forgetting the fact that they’ve just been staring at each other.

Thankfully, there was enough abject ridiculousness, like space elephant, afro skeleton, and the winnebago to at least make it slightly amusing to write about, but it was an absolute chore to watch. Production was nowhere near good enough to make all the generic and uninteresting little skirmishes interesting nor was writing utterly devoid of any emotion or characters ever going to be able to carry a story. The second season certainly had its issues too, but at least it mostly pulled things together for an action packed second half. This was just awful from start to end and it’s mildly depressing to see a series I once though was at least decent finish having nothing to do with the original except some shared technobabble.