天下制覇

It makes inane things happen.

Spring preview will be up Monday morning. It’s basically done aside from messing with sprites/sorting PVs/re-encoding/uploading etc, but there are so many other things I’d rather spend a Friday night doing than that so may as well wait until after Evol on Sunday.

Impressions:

Let me see if I have this straight. Saito, some random kid, snuck onto a military base and stole a jet. Having stolen this jet, he then proceeded to fly it into an eclipse, which as you know, transports people to magical worlds. Once through, Derflinger took over the plane’s AI because he lives on in Saito’s arm. Well, the important part is that I’m laughing. Probably not what they were going for, but hey, who am I to complain? The best part is that it had to flash back to him reading in the newspaper about the eclipse AS HE WAS FLYING INTO IT. It’s like somebody on the writing staff said "Hold on a minute, guys. How’s he supposed to know there was an eclipse right now? We need to put that in or this won’t make sense." 

What follows is nowhere near as interesting. Particularly because the horrible horrible past OP kicked in and his arm started glowing with magic which let Louise make a marginally larger explosion than usual which, as it goes with magic, turned the dragon to stone. Because that’s how dragons and magic work. Of course, they had to try to wring out slightly more drama by pretending that Saito was dead from falling to the ground with a parachute. I swear to Thor. If Japanese characters just learned how to take a pulse, they could solve so many of these corny awful scenes in a tenth the time. Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for all the new characters they introduced this season to have a point. Maybe when they make Zero F-Final Plus.

Then they get married and he introduces the underage, radioactive-haired girl that he married to his parents on their honeymoon back to the real world. Uh… ALL RIGHT THEN.

Final Thoughts:

Well, I can’t say that the show didn’t just keep on doing the exact things that it has been for the last couple seasons. No surprises at all here. Which also means that I’ve also forgotten most of this season already too. Something about desert elves living around a crashed jet in a lake, a magic mirror, and everybody took a bath. …Which about sums up my memories of the third season too… or was it the second season? Anyway, it remained very very brainless and average at best as the story continued to drag on with every character trapped in the same role that they have been since the first season because god help us all if anything ever changes.

The thing that this season most did right was having a catchy ED. It started off fairly promising, leaping right in to invasions, explosions, airships, assassins, etc, but by the end of it, they were fighting a generic dragon which was ultra serious because it was… larger and magicaler than other dragons. And everybody knows how serious it was because it ate a pointless side character who did nothing but deliver exposition on occasion the pope. It beats MechaSyd, but not by very much. Toss in some horrible machinated melodrama of Saito dying of magic… which after coming back to life a previous season from dying of swords in the eye doesn’t mean much… and… yawn.

Basically, same old, same old. It looked like it could be better at the start, but that was eventually dashed against the rocks without even really actually finishing any of the Tifa drama it felt the need to dredge back up. Better than pitching everything off a cliff like Shana did, but the baseline here is well below anything better than a popcorn show at best.