天下制覇

So much for hoping the budget was being saved up for this episode.

Impressions:

I’m surprised Hajime even bothered to show up for the finale. She may as well not have for all the nothing that she did. Not that the rest fared all that much better. Most were lucky to have over 15 seconds of screentime here. Now that says important characters! Katze is taken care of by OD with relatively little fanfare besides maybe him dying but since this is anime probably not even discounting the magical healing girl. I do appreciate how he managed to clean all the blood off of himself before handing his thingy off to Rui for extra dramaticalness. Aaaand ‘taken care of’ may be too strong a phrase since he doesn’t really seem too inconvenienced by it.

And Rui turns it into a game which of course, everyone wants to play, even the terminally ill elderly. That’s right. The world is saved by the arbitrary assignment of points. That’s all they needed. The world was doomed until a computer began giving points. If only people could come together after regular disasters or terrorists attacks without the promised reward of being ranked well in Farmville. And of course, everyone uses their internet superpowers for only good and the benefit of society, just like how the real internet works! And thus the clown no longer has any power or sway at all apparently.

Final Thoughts:

I think the main issue is that there was never any real conflict or threat to the main characters, or at worst, it was themselves. The slow pacing of it all, unbelievably naive views of social media, and superpower stuff that had almost nothing to do with… well… anything… certainly didn’t help, but Hajime was the chirpy little perfect fairy through the entire thing, never once being threatened in any meaningful way. While it was kind of endearing at the start, all she ever did was charge thoughtlessly straight ahead and since she was so special and wonderful, everything immediately worked out great. What is there to feel excited about when the main character is never truly challenged by anything? This extends to the whole later going too. Joe jobbed to the clown, but besides that, the protagonists simply steamroll their way through everything. The biggest ‘conflict’ came from X switching sides, and even that was then reset by Rui just whining hard enough.

I have no idea why the transforming hero aspect of it is even involved in the first place. Especially with the clips montage, the 12 episodes reeks of something that was originally at least 3-4 episodes shorter than ended up stretched out badly to fill time. I did enjoy the one episode where they remembered that they had characters with super powers and fought against a foe that was actually a threat to them, but the rest of it was just dumping out speech after speech about the internet. That’s not what I signed on for after three or four episodes of fighting rubix cubes while a transforming bisexual clown murderers passerbys. Which reminds me, someone should probably see about getting those people out of jail at some point since apparently all that massmurder was just ‘foreshadowing’ for hijacking X and naught more.

So disappointing basically. The main protagonist around which the whole world rotates was never challenged and wasn’t even part of the ending, while the main plot was confused and misdirected about something that the very act of reading a blog at all shows that you have a greater understanding of the internet than the makers of the show. It’s too hard to swallow, and even if you do, there’s no substance or meat for it to fall back on with the characters to carry it either.