天下制覇

Huh. Almost forgot that the entire time.

Impressions:

It's a bit weird how they don't care if a guy hangs out in the girl's locker room as long as he's gay. Does he wear a badge or something so that everyone else knows that penis means them no harm? Anyway, a very, very dull first half, consisting pretty much entirely of Kurogane sitting around thinking, or having people talk to him about his angstery. Good thing they skipped the OP to fit in another 90 seconds of talking heads so it could be completely packed at the seams. Maybe the extra money went to the godawful CGI arena. It introduced a new character or two as well, despite still not having used that journalist chick for literally anything at all. Maybe we ought to play with the toys we have before piling on new ones.

The second half was at least almost entirely action, and by action, I mean about 80% of it was the peanut gallery ascribing random crap about his heart while they sat on the sidelines. It was hamstrung from the start for being some stupid little official tournament crap and being narrated by announcers/the audience. Announcers who obligingly shut up whenever anybody else was talking. How polite of them. And of course, contrary to all sense and human empathy, the audience was comprised of 100% sociopaths aside from Team Protagonist who were happy to cheer and laugh along with the psychopath's ramblings as he tortured Kurogane. Luckily, Tits yelled out that she liked him, thus giving him the power of the force and letting him go back to what he had spent the first minute of the fight doing, but this time, it was better or something, and as soon as he fought back, Rival collapsed into a ridiculous sobbing wreck. Good god. Granted, the first minute and last minute absolutely were animted pretty decently. The problem is that they were both basically the same batting practice with balls of light and that there were 6-7 minutes of pure twaddle in between them. Oh, and that the antagonist here was utterly laughable.

We'll see if they actually move forward with their relationship after the mutual confession/cheek kiss and hug at the end. It'd be nice if it did, but I don't have the confidence in this to believe some other girl won't show up claiming to be his fiancee, long lost sandwich, or predestined betamax repair technician and set us right back to square one.