Princess Connect #21 — Sad Girls in Fields
February 28th, 2022
Still?
Impressions:
I'm pretty sure that's both the longest and most coherent sentence Yuuki's uttered in this show's entire run. But it was another completely uneventful episode that wanted to have its melodramatic cake and eat it too. Melodrama is fine, but it needs to be predicated on something. How many episodes has it been now of Yuuki and Pecorine just sitting around feeling sorry for themself? It's a good thing they've given that up for the cat or basically the entire cast would be just sitting around being sad. You are protagonists. You are supposed to be heroes. It is not getting knocked down, it is picking yourselves up. And this isn't even some major setback or loss that you've suffered! It's just a reminder of the status quo that has been in place all along, but for some reason, we're now sad for a goddamned month about.
The Kokkoro/stupidity/random gacha characters of the week bit was not a whole lot better. She was at a post office when it was robbed to send letters to invite all the gacha characters for a big gacha montage, which is apparently also something you're supposed to feel weepy about? Again, not sure why. We're just playing super dramatic music, turning up the brightness, and to hell with the writing or characters. Speaking of which, the two new characters of the week both did exactly one gag, the punchline of which was "they declared it would work but it did nothing." You might be able to combine the setup of the pink one with the punchline of the first and almost get a decent, if recycled, single joke, but that's being generous. Maybe the montage means we're finally moving to some conclusion and will stop doing all the gacha bait stuff, but I doubt it.
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Christ, I knew they’d pull the “This series was actually about TRAUMA” card only a few episodes ago and they did it fucking again for that unearned pathos with the whole time travel amnesia bullshit, all in the service of making people get “dem feels” rather than being about anything. Coat that with the need to derail itself with slapstick as part of that poisonous self-aware irony plaguing Western media and we have a depressing sign of the times when it comes to anime.
Oh and to go off on a tangent, there’s a pretty good sign that companies in the West are gonna copy what CyGames and Disney are peddling with their obnoxious brand synergy. Case in point: the live-action Uncharted movie from Sony (who owns Aniplex) based on the games published by Sony for their Sony Playstation systems and starring Tom Holland who starred in Sony’s last three Spider-Man films, with early copies and pre-order bonuses for a PS5 compilation even coming with movie tickets to go see the Uncharted movie. It’s explicitly a 2 hour long ad for the series by positioning itself as a prequel and trying to pack in as many characters and setpieces that’ll appear in the games as possible. Sadly, people bought the bait and it’s making money because there’s literally nothing else coming out before Batman this week, so we have to deal with the same song and dance with the inevitable sequel and that HBO Last of Us TV series that’ll coincide with the unnecessary PS5 remake.