天下制覇

At least it ended as it has gone. Badly.

Impressions:

Okay, time for the big final fight. Everything on the line. One vs half a dozen. So what does Carol do? Summons some Noise which are immediately slaughtered. Jesus goddamned Christ, guys. Whereupon she… turns into a giant robot lizard, so everyone uses their combined friendship power to open a hole in it, because that's something they apparently do now, so that Hibiki can create a giant fist and punch Carol. That's it. That's all. It's over. Battle won. Day saved. Eyes rolled. Wait, no. When Hibiki used her dark transformation and became Elfnein in spirit who became Daddy in spirit to save Carol, who then decided to give her life to save Elfnein from magic death sniffles, that was eye-rollingly awful. Wait, no again. The ending sequence when Hibiki showed up at her mom's with her dad and she immediately took him back… that was the most eye-rollingly godawful part of the episode and perhaps this entire stupid season. And yes, I'm including Tsubasa and Maria rubbing their tits together as their team-up attack.

Final Thoughts:

The weakest of the three seasons by a very large margin. I never thought I'd long for the day when we returned to a love-hate relationship with the moon, but the antagonists here just had a bunch of bizarre handwaving over getting enough power, and almost all their schemes after the first month of the show involved losing on purpose. They also kept carting out the Noise to be punching bags through the entire thing while the actual antagonists ended up barely more than side notes and either won (first few episodes) or lost (rest of the show) in a few attacks. They even brought back a character from a past season just to summon a few more Noise.

Not helping was the rut it fell into, which was particularly inexplicable because the main cast all did their little friendship power up to a new suit thing together before just going back and spending the next month doing it all over again, every single character compartmentalized into a single episode, with none having any stake in the fight except "We exist in the universe you're trying to unmake." Hibiki's angst with her father was probably the worst part, if for no other reason than they spent the longest on it and then resolved it so abruptly and terribly, but none of the character arcs had any depth, meaning, or lasting effect to them. It was a miracle if any even lasted more than about two minutes from start to resolution. The writing was never great, but the past seasons had a lot more energy and push to them instead of being content to rehash and repeat what it just did a couple episodes prior. At least the budget held up, but with the important fights past about the episode 3 mark all so short and one-sided, it was hard to get excited about any of them.

The series has about run its course at this point and I'd rather see people move on, even if it's just to Symphogear: The New Class, because they really seem to have run out of ideas for what to do with these characters and setting and the thought of a fourth season after the holding pattern that was this one kind of depresses me.