天下制覇

Really? This is our last boss? Really?

Impressions:

Well, that was an unceremonious end. The designated jobber character pretending to be the last boss that every character works together to hold off… forgetting perhaps that she has been defeated by practically every single one of them individually in the past. Boy, does that ever scream high tension. Well, I guess it’s not like Yoshino actually did anything. And then ending with a fakeout kiss between a character that has had jack-all to do with events in progress since I think episode 6. That sure didn’t feel tacked on or anything. 

No surprises here at any rate. Date continues, underanimated fight, obligatory scream of love, Origami continues to suck like a vacuum trapped inside a singularity trapped inside a larger singularity. The show would have been at least 4 episodes shorter and had 90% fewer conflicts if Origami didn’t keep showing up to ineffectually shoot at things, and she still manages to be a pointless, static, insecure moron. The only particularly noteworthy part… especialy for a finale… was all the particularly bizarre aftermath stuff, which for some reason included Kurumi just standing around. Ooookay. Thanks for that, I guess? How relevant.

Final Thoughts:

Well, it started uneven and ended worse. The budget declined through the entire show and the at least semi-spiffy action early on all but vanished, which is kind of a bad thing when you’re trying to sell an army of crazy timeclones as your big "take up a third of the show" arc. The music was probably the strongest part of the show, which isn’t to say that there weren’t more than a few tracks that made me want to perform an amateur tympanoplasty with a pencil, but it was solid for the most part. A number of characters had their moments too, mostly earlier on in the show before they were shoved aside into irrelevance. Some, such as Origami and like… the entire SDF group… Well, let’s just say that the show would have probably been improved just by removing that entire side of it and making it Shidou’s quest to stick his tongue into as many nonhumans as possible. Then again, I think the show would have also been improved by removing Shidou and replacing him with one of those inflatable clowns that pops back up when you knock them down.

It has a number of passable parts and some characters that can occasionally be likeable, but it’s really just too uneven and even at its best, it’s not great. There are certainly worse things to watch, but at the end of the day it’s Just Another Fighting Magical Girlfriend Light Novel Adaptation^tm that really doesn’t do much of anything to stand out from the glut of them for good or bad. Besides samba. Far from the worst thing, especially this season, but I’m not exactly going to be looking back fondly on it or missing it either.