天下制覇

Yawn. Make some thermite.

Campione had a pre-air special today. I’ll get to it in a little bit.

Impressions:

Not the strongest way to end the show. The girls’ half of the Valentines/White Day set was better, but that’s probably because Sakaki needs someone with a little bit of energy to play off of and Io needs… well… just about anything. The guys just have pretty much no comedic chemistry together and giving them a huge chunk of the half-episode was a little incomprehensible. As was the increased focus on ol’ whose-his-face, the third guy, even after they had all rejoined up again.

The first half was a little better, but not that much. Tsumiki carried parts, scratching at Io and the usual cat things, but I’ve said probably too many times to count now, it needed a lot more energy to really sell the jokes well. Too much lame wordplay, not enough physical/visual humor. The rain scene was nicely done though and would’ve been a much better ending to the show instead of the later special gummy cat thing.

Final thoughts at the bottom.

Final Thoughts:

Eh, it’s harmless enough but far from great. It has some amusing characters (and almost more importantly, a lack of particularly obnoxious ones) and never gets distracted from being a cutesy comedy, but the problem is that it’s not a particularly good comedy. It’s too much of a slave to its format and you can almost see the panels being slapped down around the jokes. It often also lacks the energy to keep things flowing well. Setup, delivery, excessive reaction, interstitial. Repeat. When it dips into more physical humor, things are a bit better, but that’s far from common and the episodes (or episode halves) where it was just a couple characters sitting around a table talking were laborious.

I’m not sure there’s a whole lot more to say beyond that. Tsumiki was certainly cute and its production was consistent and decent enough, but that’s not enough to carry an entire show. I wish there had been more episodes like the tag and snowball fight ones as that’s when the show was at its best. It actually picked up some energy instead of lulling me into a daze for a good 18 of 20 minutes. It’s not a terrible show by any means, but you’d hardly be missing anything if you completely passed it up too.