天下制覇

Does transforming into a giant pig ever help?

Impressions:

You’d think he’d be keeping a closer eye on the Infinite Angst Machine so it doesn’t accidentally provide closure instead. I’m also less than impressed by the head magic girls apparently having the ability to create tactical beam attacks wherever they feel like it. This seems like an ability that would come in handy. I did laugh at Brainy’s attempt to make them angst in his sea of… uh… stuff… and getting a motivational speech and smack in the face each one. I’d make fun of it more, but this plan seems to have been working out for him pretty well up until now. 

At least he pulled out a sword after that for a very brief bout of fencing before then transforming into a giant immobile behemoth thing. Boy, was that pathetic. It made one little barrier around Akari and spat a grand total of three beams… two of which hit the characters dead on and did nothing more than knock them back slightly… and made a shield to an insert song before giving up the ghost while Akari was hugged by the spectral spirit of her mother, who was apparently important to this battle, I guess? More than most of the rest of the group who just stood there watching at any rate.

Final Thoughts:

As I’ve said through the run, excessively, I’m aware, there are the glimmerings of a rather good show in here. There’s a subtle undercurrent of psychological damage from being forced to bloodily murder friends and family that I really wish had been focused on and explored further, and it certainly had the budget to put together relatively consistent and decently animated action scenes. There’s certainly a lot of promise for making a dark show about characters trapped doing something necessary but unpleasant and dealing with it in their own unhealthy ways (and overcoming it, or not), but there’s just too many problems in execution. 

It wields the angst like a sledgehammer, never does a good job of rounding out the characters to make the audience care about them since it did go the "pity everyone" route, and makes the very poor assumption that we’ll feel sorry for petty people with murderous urges who go on to become monsters. There’s also a few really instances of just bizarre writing at times, primarily the whole Shadow Clone thing which came out of nowhere and left just as quickly and was poorly handled all around lacking both weight and agency to the story and characters. The whole thing just had a lot of problems figuring out what it was trying to do and the pseudo-monster of the week format through the start probably wasn’t appropriate even if they had done a good job making the monsters sympathetic if the latter half was going to be driven by Akari et al angsting it up.

So it’s an interesting show for the ideas within it if nothing else. It has the production talent to have theoretically really make them work well and every now and then, there’s things in it that they teased that I would have really liked to see them develop further, but fails to realize its potential and instead opts for an honestly kind of inappropriately saccharine ending to it all.