天下制覇

I still have two more final forms.

Impressions:

I guess at least the animators had some amusement at the end here, even if they skipped about every other frame in the process. Better than the parts where it tried to get all metaphysical or just had characters yelling about how much they care about each other. No grand surprises either. The side characters remained totally unrealized despite the amount of scenery they spent chewing up, the antagonist remained no kind of threat in any way despite her ability to turn into a lizard and regenerate things that the protagonists effortlessly exploded, and everything still boiled down to characters yelling about how much they cared about each other.

Final Thoughts:

The only parts of this that I can say I really enjoyed were when the animators got to really cut loose and be weird, in particular, the sci fi episode early on. The story was hot garbage on a cracker with the characters to match. The real kicker was that one character who had her own stealth episode about a ridiculously romantisized version of senility, who was then forgotten, yet still kicked off another big angstfest, all leading to nothing but the reveal that the cult's quest was for ultimate power… just before the cult was unceremoniously wiped out by the real antagonist. Everything about the cult and its indistinct, dumbass non-plan may as well have not existed and nothing but a minute or two of forboding from each episode would've been missing.

As for the cast, from start to finish, it was just one character incessantly shrieking about how much she cared about the other while the other suffered constant bouts of self-doubt about whether or not the former really cared that much about her. There was no growth on anybody's part. There was no character arc to be found. Just yelling about friendship. And yet, the side characters had it even worse. Some were introduced to great fanfare only to end up being barely even props, others ate up absurd amounts of screentime and ended up being nothing but tools for delivering exposition or deus ex machinas for resolving things so the protagonists can keep their hands clean… and dwell in their pure illusion of adolescence forever. Ha. Now that might've been a damn appropriate ending and an actual coming of age affair. Too bad the writers decided to glorify childishness selfishness and pettiness instead, leaving us with immature, dickwads for characters… but at least they're friiiiiiends.