天下制覇

  

Except not really because we’ve just stopped caring about anything making sense.

Impressions:

Well, that made absolutely no sense whatsoever, but I guess better to go out with a flash and bang into magical but not really alternate but not really desolate but not really land than to continue the 7 episode sputter of nothingness into nothingness. And better to go out with some overtures of comedy than the total descent of angst and hug power than I was expecting. Which isn’t to say that most of it wasn’t dull boringness or it didn’t end with hug power, but the hug didn’t even come until the very end right before a singularly weird ED montage of stills set to the OP. 

Regardless, this was a dramatic step upward from everything since about episode 4, including once again decent action reminiscient of episode 4’s fight. At least until they took to the air and turned into lines… which was over half the fight. And like Gunslinger Stratos, even taking that aside, there were a couple moments where the animation, uh… stopped. Maybe you should’ve spent a little more effort on that instead of making a new OP for the last episode only. Really though, with the sudden “Oh, we’re doing a tournament again after all, but really short,” one has to wonder why they ever stopped with that schtick in the first place and faffed around with the club crap in the first place instead of just sticking to that one thing and building it up the whole way. I still have no idea why half the cast even exists for that matter, especially jealous pink hair.

Season preview will be up hopefully tomorrow, maybe Wednesday. It’s all done but the pixelling, which I recognize is the only reason people read it anyway.

Final Thoughts:

In the third and fourth episodes, the action side of things kicked in briefly, effort was spent on the animation, and characters exclaimed things along the lines of “This is really exciting and fun!” And I was behind that sentiment. Which makes it all the more mystifying that all that was abruptly then dropped and never seen from ever again, especially the budget as that went from trainwreck to okay right back to trainwreck. That’s kind of a microcosm of the show’s problem. Everything is completely haphazard and thrown together without meaning or purpose. All these characters that we get angsty backstories for were barely part of their own episodes, let alone the greater story. And what was the greater story? Who the hell even knows? First there was a tournament, but the protagonist got knocked out of that off-screen, then she wanted to make a club because… making a club is its own reward? Even the small day to day things were a mess. My favorite was how they introduced that music girl as a dreaded foe at the end of an episode, then she was unceremoniously defeated by a side character and basically never seen ever again. What the hell was the point?

All this was headed by a lead whose enthusiasm was fine at the start, but since she was the perfect, flawless, friendshippest, most wonderful person ever who healed the tortured souls of everybody by simply being nearby. The mere thought of someone not wanting to be her BFF is enough to physically attack someone for the affront. It’s ridiculous, and all in service of trying to build up to something as plain as “I had my feelings hurt this one time, and my teenage angst is literally tearing the world apart and a hug from girl Jesus will make everything better and we’ll ride off on a rainbow unicorn.” There was literally nothing else going on. No character arcs for anybody. Hardly any passable jokes. No plot. Nothing at all but stringing that out from start to finish until the inane ending that hardly even seemed to have anything to do with any of them. Huzzah.