天下制覇

Sadly, not all that much.

Impressions:

Eh. Too little, too late. Still probably the most impressively animated episode of the show, but had all the usual problems. The action wasn’t that good and the constant exposition in the middle of about four punches thrown kept it from actually getting exciting, despite whatever bad insert songs they might try to throw in. Izayoi was probably the most ‘amusing’ as far as that went, as every time they cut to his fight against I’ve-Forgotten-His-Name-So-Let’s-Call-Him-George, it was the same "slam Izayoi into the ground, then taunt him" before he floated off into the ether as a cloud of sparklies.

They did a significantly better job in general in the second half, respectable even. Well, the start of the second half at any rate. The fight against Pest ended exceptionally anticlimactically. For some reason, slipping straight from her effortlessly taking them all on to them effortlessly curbstomping her multiple times over once she goes for her big attack doesn’t create what one would call a satisfying narrative. They even had to throw in a damnable flashback in the middle of it, just to make absolutely sure that any sense of flow had been murdered in the process.

And then they started a commune and lived as hippies.

Final Thoughts:

Unfortunately slow, uneventful, and unimpressive along the way. A shame because the show did have a lot of potential with some strong, likeable characters, a good dynamic between a lot of them, and at least a somewhat interesting setting, but it clearly lacked the budget to actually let them shine. Somehow, the ED ended up being possibly the most impressively animated thing about the show, or maybe the episode that was about playing tag. Ugh.

In the end that resulted in a whole lot of exceedingly generic and utterly forgettable episodes full of info dumping heads without a single impressive climax to any of the small arcs thanks to an increasingly strained budget. Exposition is not how you expand a setting or create actual conflict. The absolute worst offender came at the very end where it hit a pause button on where it left off from the last episode just to have a twenty minute conference about how they were going to fight next episode.

It’s not the worst thing, but it’s visually dull for a show that likes to pretend to be about super powered people fighting gods and mythological figures and even on the rare cases where something does happen, there’s really little payoff to it along the way.