天下制覇

I’d rather pretend the first half doesn’t exist.

Impressions:

I don’t even know where to begin with the problems that Azusa’s melodrama nonsense had. I already touched on how it was fabricated at the end of last week just to have a cliffhanger, but there wasn’t even enough to it to last an entire bloody episode. Just one maudlin half that was more or less info dumps and not even following your own goddamned premise. There’s something inherently wrong with having your character be forced to say everything he thinks, then turning around and having him silently narrate his thoughts. It’s like they just simply forgot what the hell the show was about. I’m not even sure I should be happy about the moronic nonsense lasting only 10 minutes or not. It certainly wasn’t worth a bloody cliffhanger if it was going to be wrapped up so quickly and with such little fanfare or lasting effect. If you skipped those ten minutes, you probably wouldn’t have noticed a damn thing.

The second half was at least a little more levity focused although still lacks the charm of the initial episode. Too slow, too little interaction, too few jokes, etc. The mask stuff was really just sort of jabbed in like a vestigial appendage, but it beats the massively ritalinized jealousy fights over him that took up the other 80% of the half. You can’t make that particularly interesting if you’re not going to have them interact in any way. Especially when your premise is that one of the girls can’t express any emotion. Then again, it’s not like they’re doing a good job remembering their core premise anyway.