天下制覇

We don't even need to show it!

Impressions:

I wasn't expecting a lot from this episode, but holy Zeus, was it horrendous. The protagonists barely even showed up for the first half of the 'climactic' battle, then it was time for friendship power, and the entire 'battle' was shorter than the time spent to summon their weapons, and ended in a single blow. This was without any hyperbole the worst fight of the entire goddamned series, and I hesitate to even call it a fight at all. What's the matter, Silver Link? Did the budget completely run out? You should be ashamed of thinking that fight was acceptable.

Anyway, stakes at minimum, struggle was to show up, not to actually fight, and it was won in seconds. But boy, did they win that tournament! Why the hell am I supposed to care about that again? Special note goes to the supposed Big Bad who was Team Rocketed away at the conclusion of the arc because 'love' conquers… school tournaments, I guess?

Final Thoughts:

While it did distinguish itself a little bit from others of its light novel ilk early on by having a bit more of a budget and moving the main duo into their relationship quickly, it extremely frustratingly proceeded to do jack all with either of those and got mired in a goddamned school tournament where the stakes could not be lower and coincidence always contrived to fall into line where they were supposed to. While the fights were animated, there was rarely ever any weight to them because of the aforementioned tournament, so very little was ever on the line except for bruised feelings, and almost all of them were badly broken up by exposition in the peanut gallery. Even when they shut up and focused on animating the action instead of talking heads, it all too often took the form of batting practice until someone spontaneously remembered they were holding an extra secret power back thanks to someone yelling encouragement, rather than anything not exasperating.

As for the characters… as I said, early on, they seemed promising. However, it began at ridiculous levels of physical… I hesitate intimacy, so let's go with contact, tried to rewind it, and make things cutesy and chaste after the fact. You can't unring that bell. Even without that, the relationship between the two leads was insubstantial as hell. You could've removed the two or three kisses and it would've fallen right back into being indistinguishable from all its other "do nothing" LN bretheren. All of the rest of the characters suffered similarly. At best, they existed for the 2-3 episodes of their arc, and then immediately disappeared off the face of the planet again. I guess it's better to have them obnoxiously insert themselves into every single episode, but damn near everyone was a whiff of smoke passing in the breeze. Antagonist was… nonexistent, but that ship's sailed this season.

It threatened to be a little better than the usual magical school magical fighting magical teenagers light novel schlock that Japan spews 23,481 out a year for a few episodes, but those were ambitions it didn't come anywhere even close to reaching and like so many of its ilk, is going to be forgotten in approximately 2 hours after the final episode, a particularly terrible one at that, is viewed.