天下制覇

 

Well, it ended better than it went.

There’s another 10 minute OVA or bonus… thing or whatever you want to call it for the dog marrying show for the scant few interested in such. I’m ready to forget it ever existed.

Impressions:

Well, I guess if the whole show had been like this, I probably would have had a better opinion of it, but after many episodes of wallowing in pure melodrama, it was more than a little bizarre for them to try to switch gears and run with comical action and slapstick again. Especially with the graveyard flashback jammed into the middle of it. I highly highly suspect that someone said “Oh crap, we did up this melodramatic bit of nonsense and forgot to put it in an episode! One of our characters might go without an angsty backstory! We can’t have that!” As the chihuahua said to the amorous rottweiler, it doesn’t fit.

At least Blandy’s involvement was token at best, although that begs the question of why he even showed up. Or had all that time dedicated to him manning up. Or was even in the show at all for him to just fail to do anything and then slap a couple grunts with a fly swatter. Not even a giant fly swatter. It’s probably a good thing they didn’t try to wrap up anything else either. It was silly enough with all the characters switching sides for no real discernable reason, or all the newfound magical powers and transformations never before seen. No, it wasn’t Disco Devil Daddy eating people with the power of cigar smoke, it was friendship, and latent love or something. That’s what’s truly important. And why the climactic moment was just Kate and D3 shouting platitudes at each other. I think you spent the effort at the wrong place, A-1.

Final Thoughts:

I have a hard time even knowing what to call this in the end. Like many a show, it tries to do too much and doesn’t do a good job at any of it. The ‘wacky’ characters indicate a comedy, but the jokes are weak and attempts at social commentary preachy and delivered in purely expositional form. All the guns, explosions, and lightsaber battles that even sometimes have effort put into them seem like it’s trying to sell the action, but there’s not nearly enough of it and very little of it is related to the central events instead of the easily-jettisoned side characters. The drama is absolutely token, thrown out and then forgotten as quickly as it came with nobody ever learning anything or growing in any way.  

As I started to write this, I thought back to what the earlier episodes were about and besides the smoking episode, came up fairly blank. Such is the curse of the episodic show that doesn’t really do much to stand out. Oh the characters are dressed gaudily, but besides that, everyone has a bogstandard angsty flashback (all in turn) and is hardly involved in any meaningful way with what weakly passes for the central plot. And speaking of central, the leads are made only blander by trying to be bland amongst the ridiculously dressed and tried to slap a weak-as-hell romance on top of them. And then he may as well have not even shown up for the finale at all after being the lens through which the entire show revolved, barring angsty flashbacks.

So I guess that’s my ever-lazy and oft-repeated critical statement in the end; it’s extremely insubstantial and very forgettable. Hell, I’ve already apparently forgotten most of it. It doesn’t do anything well enough to last, either good or bad, and despite the overtures of crazy wacky world conqueryness, is content to walk the same well-worn and totally unambitious path of a hundred other already-forgotten shows about a bland male lead and the wacky people around him.