天下制覇

   

Fantastic!

Impressions:

Well, that was a total mess, although it’s not like anybody expected much else. I think it was all the stabbing I enjoyed the most, and by enjoyed, I mean my eyes ache from all the rolling. It was up to the magic 8-ball whether or not the stabbing was to be simply shrug off or if it was a critical blow. None had any weight or import anyway, but the Chaika Community deserves some kind of award for exceptional extraneousness just for the amount of time they ate up and apparent effort, yet never making themselves even the slightest bit important to what was going on, let alone an actual threat to anything. And then it ended with just utter nonsense, yet another conference of people far, far away and Toru deciding that he doesn’t actually care that much about fighting or whatever after all. You didn’t have much of a character to begin with, chap. That was pretty much it. There wasn’t any big moment between them at any point, or for him either where he had some revelation or anything. Just decided he was done after growing tail armor and ready to take care of Chaika now that she made the ultimate sacrifice of her life force or memories or whatever the hell Japan is using as gunpowder these days.

And speaking of tail armor, I am quite disappointed that Frederika didn’t turn into a harrier, although not at all surprised that as always, she did absolutely nothing but play shortbus to the moron before jobbing yet again. All Toru got was some stupid armor and daggers that grow. When held at crotch level. To penetrate his mentor. Who also served no purpose in the end. Just like the rainbow Chaika brigade and pretty much every single character that has been involved in this fiasco of an arc. And the gun girl who just decided to switch sides because why not. Which is enough to win the day over the greatest super mage ever in one long drawn out shot. Because screw dodging. Another choppy sentence fragment.

Final Thoughts:

Yeesh, writers. On one hand, they did spend a lot less time fussing over the side characters and having dull conferences this season (which isn’t to say they were gone entirely, or couldn’t have been jettisoned into a kraken with no effect on the story at all), but I’m at something of a loss to say what they actually replaced that with. It sure as hell wasn’t character development, or even focus on them, including the titular character. Exposition, I guess, although there was plenty of flat-out padding, lest we forget the obligatory pre-arc “Why don’t we just use Frederika to solve this?” conversations which never once gave a convincing answer.

The action took a pretty big hit too. A major part of the first season was spent introducing characters, rivals, etc, so if nothing else, at least it had new things, but this season was totally satisfied with the status quo, so the only real antagonist came at the very end and about 7 episodes were spent fighting grunts and magic dogs. Also, while the first season had a bunch of little adventures, this ended up dragging even the slightest thing out multiple episodes, such as running into some woman who didn’t even want her macguffin but had to put them through a test to prove their worthiness anyway. There was never any payoff and the highest it reached was some saccharine crap about friendship power, multiple times. Other arcs ended with even less. The island arc in particular was just full of characters and plans that went nowhere and/or had no reason for existing at all, let alone eating up as much time as they did. The gun girl and beast people especially come to mind.

A stronger focus on the laughably poor story done through walls and walls of exposition, and less on the characters/adventuring did this series absolutely no good. It’s still watchable, I suppose, but the first season was certainly a lot more fun in just about every single way.