天下制覇

 

The phrenologists are probably crying.

Impressions:

Competent if expectedly (and somewhat boringly) cliche. It probably helped that Phino just didn’t talk period through the final battle, and Raul was just yelling random store phrases. Not the kind of witty repartee I’d actually compliment, but a step or eight above the pointless verbal spew of feeeeeeelings that has been choking this season. No, that came a little later with strangling time and of course, ended with the hug of magic cancellation.

At least they kept up the effort with the animation. The art… had some issues, to understate things to a comical degree. A problem the show’s had through its entire run, but especially obvious this week with all the misshapen heads, bodies, and I’m pretty sure hands were on backward at more than one point. Still, it was better than… well… anything the show did in the last two months. And I guess we’re just ignoring Walmart enslaving, whoring, and mass murdering things. Oh well.

 

Final Thoughts:

Eh. Would have made a passable OVA, but from about episode 4 to episode 10 was boring nonsense filler basically. Good god, there was nearly a month spent on air conditioners and Walmart, two things that went absolutely nowhere and might as well have been about dildos and pudding for all the relevance they had to the ending arc. Even episodes 2 and 3 were kind of pointless, but they were still in the “draw the audience in with spending some effort on fighting goo monsters” phase before pissing off to do blow for the next two months. Maybe we should have actually done anything after introducing Walmart as the super-realistic (but not really at all) evil if we wanted to actually play that off of the ‘silly’ evil.

And speaking of which, the comedy was basically a one-trick pony based around Phino and the whole hero/demon lord thing that even if you are Japanese enough to have lived through that era enough to soak that thing in, has already been done to death. The rest of the cast was similarly fairly one-dimensional and never was there any growth or the status quo even threatened in any slight way, if only for an episode for a character to learn a valuable lesson about teen pregnancy or something.

The first couple episodes and the last couple might be worth a watch if you’re interested, but the rest are so much white noise. Even then, I wouldn’t put it above harmless fantasy action-pseudocomedy.