天下制覇

Building so much tension.

Impressions:

I'm five minutes into this episode, watching a bunch of dudes in cloaks slowly walk down a passage, discussing the geopolitical situation with 'helpful' flashbacks and thinking to myself "What the goddamned hell was anybody thinking with this scene?" Then again, it came after another bit of the big bad slowly walking up to a garrison, not a single person paying an iota of attention to him until he then kills half of them with one swing. A brief scuffle and it's back to people walking down corridors or sitting on a couch as they review the situation. Special shoutout to the one faceless soldier who got the speaking line when the baddies got off their ass and attacked while his twenty friends stood there like statues.

That brings us to the halfway point in the episode where the protagonists finally join the battle, and I am at a genuine loss to say which would be worse, if the good guys then dispatched the baddies after all this, or if they succeeded. It was the former, because we needed to make time to get back to "Dudes walking down corridors." But then that was just leading to the whole little coup being dispatched by Some Other Old Dude… offscreen. It's possible we've seen him before, but he was wearing a cloak, so I assume not. I can't keep all these throwaway old men straight. And so this half of the show ends. Hell if I know what this mini coup arc was supposed to accomplish. Mariya and Free both struggled with and were more involved with the random crazy duo that used fairy balloons and self-immolation in a random basement.

Summer season preview will be up on Wednesday or Thursday.

'Final' Thoughts

This will be back in three months to presumably pick up the character arcs it totally abandoned in the second half so not really a final wrapup, but I'm pretty doubtful I'll be returning to it. The characters were thrown in the trunk over the last month or so to allow the political stuff to drive everything, and in a setting about super powered super soldiers with pet soul monsters running around, I could not care less about a bunch of crusty old farts discussing the geopolitical situation week in and week out. It wasn't even great to start with, constantly delving backward into flashbacks for other times when people stood around morosely talking about how bad war is. The music was decent, if not always fitting for the setting or scenes, and the action was animated… when it existed. There's no purpose to it though, and the cast is a bunch of lifeless clods.