天下制覇

Are we still explaining this?

Impressions:

Did you enjoy the last 12 minutes of episode 11? Well, here they are again, but spread across twenty minutes! Joy! And not only that, but we're going to be getting some truly half-assed rewriting about how just because his power seems like a completely ridiculous deus ex machina, that doesn't mean it's always a ridiculous deus ex machina. It can't do anything. It just, you know, does exactly what he needed it to through no actual effort of his own at exactly the right time with the exactly convenient solution. Great walking back! I can't think of a better way to end a show than a hastily thrown together rationalization that the writing wasn't full of crap.

Final Thoughts:

There could've been a pretty interesting show in here, but it had fundamental problems, mostly with the writing, but also with the budget which swung back and forth between fully animated and entire episodes of talking heads prattling on. It wasn't all that interested in telling a compelling story about the current events of the fight, which should've been the meat of all things, but almost all of the backstories it used to fill the time were trite at best. A few were passable, Boar and Tiger being the first two that come to mind. They had actual arcs to them. Most, however, were just a recitation of character traits at laborious length, and goddamned everybody ended up being "Rarr, I'm a meanie and I kill people." A couple characters, the ones the damn current events ended on, didn't even get that much.

I come out of it mostly feeling frustrated at what it could've been. Telegraphing the order of killing the characters, and offing them as soon as they got their backstory kept developments from ever surprising the audience, but they also teased connections between the characters and a greater plot which never went anywhere or came to fruition, opting for anticlimax at every single opportunity. Hell, I would've taken them rebelling against the Hunger Games tournament crap as an improvement. Lord knows fighting The Evil Empire would've been more satisfying than Rat sleeping his way to a win and then an episode and a half victory lap.