天下制覇

   

Not the only thing that was sucking.

Impressions:

Well, at least the action was decent… except for all the times they kept cutting away to the peanut gallery in an eleventh hour attempt to provide context, or all the times they stood still while grunting at each other, or how it ended with hugs and now the real battle begins just to end a moment later in a foregone explosion. Oh god, what am I doing? Why am I bothering trying to make excuses for this show? A little effort into ‘animating’ the final fight isn’t going to save this now. Doing some of the choreography decently doesn’t keep the rest of the episode from walking right down the obnoxious cliche path we all knew was coming, right down to the cow being resurrected as a shoulder tamagotchi. They fight until one spontaneously goes “The power of friendship has healed me!”, deus ex machina descends from on high to fix everything that they really forgot to show was ever even broken in the first place, and everyone goes home for goddamned cake.

Final Thoughts:

It tried to run the gamut from wacky punny slapstick to seriousish character drama, but the only thing it was any decent at was SD CGI martial arts. The drama bits were probably the most insultingly bad. They took two forms, character death to be revived immediately thereafter, or empty lip service. Oh no! Don’t do that! It’ll have some kind of effect… somewhere… probably. It doesn’t even use its gimmick well. With 12 episodes and 12 zodiac animals, you’d think the basic structure would be easy, but it skips over a bunch, returns to others partway through, and has the gall to have a goddamned recap episode two months in. I’m aware that they can’t really ditch the zodiac animals, but most existed only for their single joke, and the males in the show never served any purpose whatsoever. Oh wait, he was a pair of ears for all the unneeded exposition to pad out the time, as if the recap episode wasn’t enough for that.

Perhaps not offensively bad, but I’m not feeling generous today, so it can eat a butt.