Pandora in the Crimson Shell #12 — Shrieking Opera

March 25th, 2016

 

Sweet merciful gods, someone fire the sound guy.

Impressions:

Well, it was an ending, I guess, although once again, someone was asleep at the audio mixing wheel, particularly during the upskirt portion. Good lord. That was nearly a monotonic drone blaring over everything and a marked relief when the 'dramatic' moment finally ended a few minutes later, only to be replaced by operatic shrieking and a particularly awful appeal to friendship power with the idiotic three legged lion thing to finish things off. Nor did it help that the big bad's big bad doom mech was yet another circular large robot. But this one had arms, so it's totally different from the ones in Dimension W. Oh, and it was defeated because it jumped from too high and it took Dr. Wily a few minutes to remember that it could fly. An ending it might have been, but climactic it was not.

Final Thoughts:

Not the most insufferable thing airing this season, but was crippled by a lack of a budget, poor pacing, and totally undeveloped characters. The latter two feed into each other especially since the 9 episodes in between the start and finish are little more than a holding pattern for everything. They don't use the time to deepen the characters or their relationship, move the story forward, or add anything. Even when the story supposedly did start moving, spurred only by the episode count, it did so mostly in theory and we got an entire episode of padding and exposition about things that stopped being relevant even before the explanation of them was finished.

There are a few episodes that almost work episodically, particularly the ones that provide some manner of actual crisis instead of "girls bumble around all day," but far too few, and still nobody ever evolves beyond being a gag and/or lesbian. There's no substance anywhere in the show. Even the antagonists are laughably Dr. Wily-esque, despite the show attempting to sell them off as serious. Thankfully, some of the recurring gags are more visual and incidental than screamed in the face, so it was an easier pill to swallow than many of Japan's recent 'comedies', but this is a show that very, very badly needed either a little more meat on its bones or a lot more ambition with the humor. Preferably both.

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