天下制覇

Were we supposed to care if she won?

Impressions:

For anybody who was wondering what kind of ending this was going to have, the answer is none. Or maybe the same ending as half the other episodes of this show have had. Ten minutes spent on the usual handwavey nonsense, then they go to overtime for five more minutes doing the exact same thing (but to an insert song!) before they get sucked into the grunting aura dimension whereupon the protagonist wins at the last second, thus… winning, I guess? With nothing accomplished, no personal growth, nothing to accomplish, and absolutely nothing on the line, she… won some stupid little tournament. Fan-goddamned-tastic.

Season preview will be up after I eat dinner. It's similarly dismal.

Final Thoughts:

This was a hard freefall from almost the first episode, occasionally particularly noticable in the budget even. A little bit of humor and somewhat less obnoxious/better rounded characters to start out made me stick with it, but that was a very stupid decision on my part. The sport was complete nonsense relying on handwaving and key jangling from start to finish, getting especially goddamned awful at the end, and exceedingly padded out by constantly cutting away to see the peanut gallery ooh and aah over it. The characters never grew or developed in any way, and remained the same static piles of blah the entire way through. The closest to any kind of growth were a couple of the sideliners getting mopey for an episode or two, getting  a good night's sleep, and then feeling better. No meaningful interactions with anybody else spurred it. Just got a touch of the mopies and then changed their mind and stopped being mopey.

There was not a single character in this entire thing that could not have been written out of the story because there was no story to speak of. No point. No purpose. Nothing. Why does this exist? What is it trying to tell? Or was it just spawned as a way to fill three hours with white noise? All that is really here is looking at some lines flashing around and not even oohing and aahing over that, but watching other characters ooh and aah as they narrate how cool this stuff that you're only sometimes seeing, half the times in stills, is.