天下制覇

Yawn. There’s football to watch.

Impressions:

Well, that was entirely lame in every way. An unspectacular ending was inevitable with the utter lack of any kind of setup anyway, but they could have at least tried. Or, you know, just not focused on all the plot threads that they had zero intention of resolving, let alone ones introduced in the closing seconds. But my personal campaign against Japan’s belief that ‘adaptation’ means ‘copy paste the existing text’ is nothing new at all nor will it end here. We all know that these are mostly just marketing for the source, but take some damn ownership and pride in your work, people.

Even regardless of that, it was just a very boring episode with very little of even the half-assed action or almost any of the comedy that have made up the slight lumps that could be called this show’s high points thus far. Instead, there’s Fuyumi in her underwear and Staz/Fuyumi talking about their feeeeeeeeeeeeelings, something both out of place and pointless as getting past a handshake and "I’d rather he/she not die" is tantamount to a marriage proposal as far as Japanese media is concerned.

Final Thoughts:

At the start, it mostly distinguished itself by blasting through character introductions and plot points, and the fast pace kept things from dwelling on the flimsy plot, characters, and humor by moving right along from one to the next. Very quickly though, it brought all of that to a grinding halt and started actively asking the audience to take a close look at its flimsy plot and characters while cutting out more and more of the humor for the sake of overtures at a nonsensical plot that was going nowhere slowly with completely static characters. A song and dance we’ve seen many, many times before.

So an overall mediocre affair. I’m not familiar with the source, but I suspect that this was an extremely by the numbers adaptation without any ambition put into it. It has a few moments where it’s not exactly impressive, but decent enough in both the comedy and action departments, but doesn’t have either the characters or simply the writing to support really anything serious and the more it tries to focus on that stuff, the more mediocre it becomes without ever doing really a single thing that’d make it even noteworthy, good or bad.