天下制覇

   

You have lost all friendship-based privileges, Japan.

Impressions:

While I hesitate to say that filling the screen with fireworks has made the writing worse, it certainly hasn’t made it any better either. Hell, the first half was spent on them having a briefing about how they were going to unleash a doomsday arsenal, which they then prepared for by… having yet another party. “Should we be getting ready, or setting up anything?” “Nah, but you know what? I’ve got some sparklers.” “Sweet!” I forget how many days this has actually covered, but I’m pretty sure that this is the seven thousandth party they’ve thrown celebrating their friendship. When the midway point finally hit and it was time to launch, they had another friendship circle and friendship leap for joy framed by fireworks to insert song of super friendship times. This was the entire goddamned first half of the episode. Another goddamned edition of “Yay friends!” and another goddamned party in celebration of what great friends they are.

It is nice that once they finally bothered to actually leave the house for the first time since the goddamned first episode, Mappa apparently found enough budget to… have them beat up a bunch of mooks. I particularly liked how the big boss showed up, unveiled his army of super soldiers, left, and then the protagonists left too allowing magic possessed Rabura to fight them offscreen. Then again, trying to work in the useless girl by giving her a mech and telling her this is so serious and not a game, somehow missing that the other choice is to sit on her ass and wait for everybody to die because Japan feels the need for characters to throw tantrums about anybody doing anything. Which is to say that the writing remained godawful even when it was trying to replace it with flashy colors and loud noises.