天下制覇

Note: Rei died on her way back to her home planet.

Impressions:

Oh boy, was this something. I’m not sure what the biggest joke of the episode was. Maybe how the characters just sat around for the first third of the episode staring at it and crying while the director tried to build up tension by having it shoot jets and boats. You know… the same thing the first generic monster of the entire series did. I don’t even know what the plan there was. "It hasn’t ever worked before, but maybe this time!" Or why they were all just sitting there staring at it while it nuked people. "So… anybody with super powers here feel like attacking it?" "Naaaah." Or maybe it was the shout of "Friendship power!" to a giant floating eye that had yet to even scratch any of them. Which she/they then punched. In the eye. Or maybe how the big ending was Lesbian Black taking a magical key and stepping through a magical door that appeared out of nowhere underneath a giant glowing infinity symbol to travel through time and space. I feel like I’ve missed some kind of major plot point here. Or like… four.

So I laughed. Boy did I laugh. That’s certainly… uh… something at least. And yet it’s kind of tragic that people were paid to write this. I’m 95% sure that the creators didn’t have a single trace of the ironic in them when they made this. Lord knows they probably couldn’t have made something as big a joke if they did.

Final Thoughts:

Stop me if you’ve heard this song and dance before. Not a bad start as it races through each character’s intros in turn along with the budget running high leading into absolutely nothing happening for the second half of the show and the budget nose diving. Then an evil crow eats a character and becomes the same generic monster the team’s fought all along. Okay, maybe the last part’s unique, but certainly not in a good way. What’s kind of striking as I look back is that every other character had one to one and a half episodes before they became inseparable best friendies forever, but Rei took about six. That’s kind of a microcosm with the pacing problems right there.

Usual speech about weak characters and events not moving fast enough to cover up for them. The show was at its best when it was light and silly, like episode 3. Unfortunately, it wanted to be more melodramatic and sentimental while the characters remained little more developed than mewling cats. It doesn’t get by on flash either. The transformation sequences are easily the highlight in that department. The rest of the action was… competentish, but lacked a good antagonist to really add any sense of tension to them, so they were little more than eye candy. Buuuuut, monsters of the week that they nigh effortlessly beat each time, especially ones that look like toasters and are indistinguishable from each other anyway since they’re all just firing lasers from slightly offscreen… that gets old fast. I was hoping Rei would develop into at least a rival for them ala Fate/Nanoha or Kurisu/Symphogear, but no such luck.

Eh, take all that and make something out of it. It’s not a terrible show and besides some inane writing at times, doesn’t do too much horribly wrong, but I can’t think of a single thing it does well enough to make it worth watching. At least besides creating figures to flog.