天下制覇

 

Are you kidding me?

Impressions:

What a bloody mess. After the episodes of Blondie as the damsel in distress, they completely jettisoned her as a plot device until it was time to get someone stabbed and instead decided that this was going to be all about Doofus being angsty over fighting his brother. I thought we moved past this like… weeks ago. Not that that stopped him from immediately dropping his guard the moment Lizard said “Oh, I changed my mind. Again. Friends?” And since this is the season of horrible parents, it turns out that Mom was the true villain all along!

I don’t even have any idea how Blondie was out and wandering around anyway. I’m pretty sure the last time we saw her, she had ‘escaped’ right into the room of someone leering at her, and then she ends up wandering into the middle of an enormous battlefield that everyone just happened to get together at because… uh… that’s not explained either. And then Whose-Her-Face effortlessly chucks Blandy into the past along with his brother, one of them to grow up to maybe become Voldemort in the present-now-future-where-everyone-else-is. And this is how it ends. What the bloody hell.

Next Episode:

Setting the inane ending aside, this’ll end up in the same category as Tokyo Ravens and Noragami, a mildly inoffensive action show (barring a couple atrocious early episodes) that will be deservedly forgotten within a month. I guess its distinguishing feature from the other two is characters that needed a few more hard smacks across their noseless chops. The lead had the personality of a soggy wafer, the supporting cast was either largely extraneous or extremely inconsistent in characterization, and the antagonists were all over the place, both comically tie-the-girlfriend-to-the-train-tracks evil and attempting to tempt the protagonist to the dark side by claiming they were justified because of this one thing happened to some guy a while ago. It tried to have its cake and eat it too with both some big wizard faction battle and the more personal “save the brother/girlfriend from my evil brother/brother” plots, but the two barely were mostly tangential to each other and the whole Slytherin side of things may as well have not existed at all except to serve as a distraction from the already poorly handled characters.

The action is probably where the show was at its dubious best. About half the fight scenes were decent enough magical bouts with choreography and budget to back them, the former trait being something a lot of ‘action’ shows this season were distinctly lacking. The other half were nightmarish expositional feats of stupidity where characters stood across the room and rule lawyered at each other for five minutes before one side left in victory… and then half the time, the other one left in defeat right after. That’s not enough to make the show worth watching, especially with some of the genuinely horrible episodes that were there purely to pad out the length, but there were a few glimmers of a decent show that came by every three weeks or so. Mostly when everybody shut the hell up and tried to hit each other with fireballs or ridiculously oversized weaponry. I’m a man of simple tastes. .