天下制覇

 

That’s how you can tell he’s dark and serious and cool and deep and adult now.

If you’re interested, the Hoods harem flag show thing aired the first fifteen minutes of the first episode, because apparently why not. I’m aware of its existence, I just choose to ignore it for now. Also, because I flipped through quickly and goddamn is it squeaky. It airs for real on the 6th.

Impressions:

On the upside, it seems like they were saving up something in the way of budget for the end. On the other hand, in a true twist of the most bizarre fashion, the episode ended up being pretty much all about Kon. The character who has been nothing but comic relief so far, suddenly whips out the entire array of nonsense, up to and including multiple transformations, saving the day as Dumbass lies there unconscious on the ground and the antagonists are either chased off by asspulls or just… well… wander off. CLIMACTIC FINALE!

So yeah, the second half was pretty crappy and really resolved nothing. Harutora got his not-really-memories back or whatever, brought Natsume back to life, and… uh… the adventure continues apparently, which is pretty a pretty deluded attempt at sequel baiting, or maybe the message is just “Please go buy the light novels, they have a much higher profit margin.” It was so exciting that they had to fill a couple minutes with Kalrion the Witchboy having a dickwaving contest in a car with Pegleg. Now that is what everybody was hoping to see and a key dangling thread that needed to be wrapped up. Great job, team.

Final Thoughts:

I guess the two biggest failings of it would probably be pacing and action. The former especially veers heavily toward the glacial side after a decent start and has a real problem with stacking on more and more characters that interact mostly tangentially to the central ones, while the central cast sits around twiddling their thumbs, waiting to have things explained to them or for the antagonist to come to the door. The last arc is probably where it let itself down the most, with oppressively long stalling for time and the frankly silly “Natsume’s DEEEAD” schtick which they had backed out of before her ‘corpse’ had even hit the floor. Mostly though, almost every arc could’ve been done in half the episodes with little to nothing lost, which doesn’t speak well to its ability to keep up a tense or exciting pace. Too much relied on “Maybe something we’re alluding to MIGHT happen soon,” yet it never really did.

The show was at its best when they get involved and things do come to a head, especially with the initial Drill-Girl arc. While a shameless rip-off of Kill Bill, at least it was ripping off something good. It also gave her a more subtle menace that the rest of the show tried to do with the sheer force of power levels. And then they stripped all that away to make her another member of the pansexual harem. For the other climaxes, that’s usually where the exposition at least disappeared a little more and they flexed some kind of animation muscle. Not enough to be impressive or all that exciting, but besides the clumsy and silly CGI, at least not embarrassingly bad.

So tremendously unambitious but mostly harmless, I guess. I know I say this a lot (because it’s true), but I doubt anybody will remember it in a month or have any lasting memories of it at all, particularly good or bad.