天下制覇

  

I never get tired of hearing about how mass-produced pop starlets are awesome.

Early two hour special that included the first two episodes. It doesn’t actually start broadcasting until the 3rd, so the first new episode from now will be on the 17th.

Impressions:

It certainly didnt start things off well with the hilarious joke of “We’re not idols. We’re detectives!” That wasn’t the high point, although for the first eight minutes or so and with the stellar plot of “The idol’s magic mascots have disappeared, collect them all to make her a perfect idol again,” it was looking like it very well might be. With insert songs all over the place in the first two episodes, this is clearly designed for selling CDs first and foremost. It is more comical than the last outing, but so is a wake.

It’s unfortunately very much just kind of a mix between the boring awful third season and the disappointing second season where all the girls have fused into one obnoxious amorphous blob with no difference in personality. It also didn’t help that they’re sticking with the second season’s “This is SO RANDOM” style of humor without actually being so. To save her, you must… traverse an obstacle course! Making it CGI psychedelic doesn’t disguise that it’s the same bad Takeshi’s Castle thing, quickly replaced with “a wall.” And then… “We’ll dump honey on ourselves, so bees sting us, we’ll inflate, and fly!” Let’s say it was funny (it wasn’t), it stopped being so well before the first minute of it being the only joke going on. 

They go through the motions every now and then, but all they seem to be aware of from the first season are the jokes that were screamed in the audience’s face which are regurgitated with little understanding of why they once worked. Absolutely none of the constant little humor and silly stuff in the background has made its way back, to say nothing of the episodic structure. The only lesson anybody’s learning here is “Being a pop star is the greatest thing ever and everyone should respect them for being so popular,” and even that’s padded out as all hell despite it being primarily episodic. 

I glanced briefly through the second and it was pretty much more of the same; drooling over how great idols are, recycling that ‘hilarious’ OVA where Kokoro becomes an idol, and then a “random” live show sentai thing ‘parody’ at the end to insert song. Again, not as awful as the third series, but not as ‘good’ as the second and nowhere near the first at all.