天下制覇

Apparently we’re only borrowing the worst parts of TokiMemo for this one though.

Impressions:

And the show continues its descent into places all too well known. This episode was an attempt at a parody of bad school romances, but forgot to actually be a parody. For a short time, the joke was "This is different from usual!" but they abandoned that after the initial stuff to just use the setup as an excuse to jump to various cliche times (Christmas, Valentines, stuck in school storehouse, etc) and run the scenes out with the excuse that Mahiro had to go along with them… which he didn’t, so I don’t even know what the hell they were doing. If you wanted to make it funny, then overplay it. Be ridiculous about it. Don’t just paste the character designs over some godawful bland piece of tripe and call it a day. That’s not a parody. That’s just plainly terrible. Oh, and I guess a chunk of the first half was also taken up explaining that they were sucked into a game. Of course, I summarized that in six words. It took them a couple minutes and a flashback.

And in the end, the only difference between this and recent episodes was that they began obnoxiously using game terms. "This is the next event?" "I want the Nyarlko End." What hilarious twists on the usual dialogue. Half of which they were already using in the first place. Oh, and now we’re doing the first 5 seconds of various Haruhi scenes? And Hastur is dressed like Bridget? Wow. References to other things. But with your own characters. Truly geniuses of humor these. The montage had the best jokes of the episode. The montage.

Preview:

If you’re reading this, it means that I forgot to change the template.