天下制覇

Of course they take a bath.

Impressions:

Honestly, I'm not entirely sure what to make of this show. It starts with the big premise of girls fighting monsters. Fine. Whatever. Does a mediocre at best job of it by effortlessly oneshotting the thing upon transformation. Then it gets sucked into a dumb tournament kind of thing that could've replaced the sword fighting with ping pong, cooking, or damn near any club activity and everything would've been fine. When it came time for the big rival fight at the end of the episode, it instead swerved into an assassination attempt by one of the two, followed by a three way fight with a sadistic crazy person, and the two of them fleeing the school entirely.

I was 100% ready to write another weary post about it squandering the premise introduced in the opening few minutes, and it still kind of did, but the closing minute or so gives me pause and makes me wonder if there might be a writer with at least some ambition pushing for a real story here. Not enough to create the world's most inoffensive, and therefore boring, characters though. There is some budget here to make some of the action look decent, but it's pretty badly kneecapped by how getting cut in half doesn't mean jack. It's not the visceral brutality of something like Freezing, but more comical or even video gamey where everyone magically snaps back to completely fine a second later.

It did such a good job of hiding itself under the boilerplate of Yet Another Girls Go to School show through the middle that despite the (still cliche) revenge-focused ending plot swerve, I'm still not entirely convinced that's not what it is. I suppose that means it probably bought itself another week to define itself and its characters, but don't count that as being a strong start so much as a hook to the end of the episode that actually piqued my curiosity some.